“The Help” (2011), written and directed by Tate Taylor, based on a book by his childhood friend Kathryn Stockett, upon first viewing, appears to be yet another “white savior” film.
Like “Glory” (1989), “Dangerous Minds” (1996), “Amistad” (1997), “Finding Forrester” (2000), “The Last Samurai” (2003), and “Half Nelson” (2006). Also, “Freedom Writers” (2007), “Gran Torino” (2008), “Avatar” (2009), and “The Blind Side” (2009) before it.
Skeeter
Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, “The Help” stars Emma Stone as Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a recent graduate of Ole Miss. Her pre-feminist streak has her avoiding finding a husband and having babies, to her mother’s profound alarm and dissatisfaction (Allison Janney). Skeeter wants to be a writer.
She’d love to move to New York but knows she'd best prove herself journalistically before attempting that daunting hero’s journey. And so, cajoling the publisher of a local newspaper to offer her a job, she’s promptly assigned the “homemaker hints” column, something she’s got practically no experience with.
Let the Notetaking Begin
Skeeter pitches her idea to a New York publisher (Mary Steenburgen) about interviewing Southern African-American maids only two generations removed from their house slave grandmothers. However, even the publisher knows that with Jim Crow laws presiding in the deep South, getting black maids to talk would be no easy feat. It was illegal.
In the grand New York tradition of beating the showbiz catch-22 whereby to get a job you need to be considered legit and to be considered legit you need a job—Skeeter fudges the truth and says she’s already got an interview lined up. Skeeter eventually asks Aibileen (while being nagged by her publisher) if more maids might come forward with their stories. Aibileen, after being compassionately wheedled and cajoled by Skeeter, reluctantly agrees and eventually puts her in contact with other maids who have stories to tell.
The interviews commence; many maids step forward, including the hilarious Minny (Octavia Spencer) one of the area’s greatest unsung cooks. One story focuses on Minny’s merciless, mean-girl employer, Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), local Junior League president, who was bound and determined to get a bill passed requiring white families to build separate bathrooms for the help (“They carry different diseases").
During a tornado, instead of using the outhouse, Minny had the temerity to use Hilly’s bathroom. She’s promptly fired. Minny’s revenge, in the form of a very stealthy, extremely tasty, but also extremely nasty-ingredient-saturated chocolate pie, immediately tickled the imagination of America’s pop-culture universe. After Minny’s firing, however, trashy-but-beautiful hapless housewife Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain) ends up hiring Minny to teach her to cook in order to save her marriage.
Minny’s rescue of Celia’s marital life, Hilly’s comeuppance, Skeeter’s journey to becoming a writer (not to mention Aibileen’s similar journey), and the collective catharsis of many maids finally getting to tell their side of the story, carries immense cinematic satisfaction.
Performances
Emma Stone is stuck in the role of the idealistic, activist cinematic stereotype of young white adults during the civil rights era. She often feels completely current, and therefore at times out of place. And yet that idealism was of course what drove New York kids Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney to drive to Mississippi and assist in black voter registrations and it’s what got them killed by the Ku Klux Klan (depicted in 1998’s “Mississippi Burning”). Idealism is the needed element to overcome complacency and fear in order to go march with MLK, among other activist ventures, and so it’s not a stereotype, but truth.
The film’s bravura performance comes from Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly, whose Beehive-hair-do’d, stilettoed-heeled, iron-hand-in-velvet-gloved evil is such that she’d be easy to pick out of one of those 1930’s group photos where charred black men smolder in a fire pit while someone snapped a celebratory picture. Her matter-of-fact belief in her superiority is unshakeable. Some actresses might have opted for the occasional flash of humanity to mitigate the sting, so as to avoid audiences associating them with that level of human soul-deficiency, but Howard goes all out fearlessly and lets the truth of such a world-view stand there and be seen.
Viola Davis is rock solid and very moving, giving “The Help” immense emotional depth in portraying Aibileen’s powerful dignity and quiet pride. Aibileen knows that she’s risking her job and her life by confiding in Skeeter. She feels the fear and does it anyway; letting her story be heard to honor her son, the military vet, who, working in a lumber yard, had a lung crushed due to foreman negligence and was dumped unceremoniously outside a colored hospital, left to die, and indeed died on her couch.
Minny was Octavia Spencer’s breakout performance. Spencer’s performance is no less emotionally resonant, but carries more righteous anger, as well as much of the humor.
“The Help” entertains while teaching about America’s troubled racist past. Without minimizing the struggle, “The Help” will make you laugh, cry, and contemplate how far we’ve come as a society, how much has radically changed since the 1960s and, given our current racial climate, reflect on how much more progress we need.
