“The Help” should do well at the box office, with its ready-made audience: Millions bought the Kathryn Stockett novel on which the movie is based. It boasts a talented ensemble cast of actresses who completely transform themselves into early 1960s white socialites and their African-American maids. There’s a luscious attention to paid to period detail, with brightly colored frocks and subdued homes. Yet the film itself is rather black and white, keeping it from being an unalloyed artistic success. Emma Stone, the very appealing redhead (here showing off blonde hair), plays Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, who sets the plot in motion. The privileged white daughter returns to Jackson, Miss., with a degree from Ole Miss and a head full of ambition. She sees her chance to write her book and right some wrongs at the same time when she notices how poorly her fellow Jacksonians treat their help.
Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) raises a white toddler under the eyes of the child’s neurotic mother, but has lost her own son too early. Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer) has trouble finding work, thanks to her inability to remain quiet when she’s being demeaned. Skeeter learns, for the first time, what life is like in the kitchen. But that knowledge could cost her new friends their livelihoods.
| On screen |
| ‘The Help’ |
| 3 out of 5 stars |
| Stars: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain |
| Director: Tate Taylor |
| Rated: PG-13 for thematic material |
| Running time: 137 minutes |
The employers are, with just one exception, irredeemably nasty. Bryce Dallas Howard, who has certainly grown up since 2004’s “The Village,” is the ranking member of Jackson society and president of the Junior League, Hilly Holbrook. Her mother, played by Sissy Spacek, isn’t quite so unpleasant, though she doesn’t stop unpleasantness from happening to her help. Allison Janney is Skeeter’s mother, who’s hiding some secret about the girl’s own beloved black nanny.
The one exception is Celia Foote. Shunned by her former friends after her shotgun wedding, Celia knows something about what it’s like to be discarded. She’s played by Jessica Chastain, a versatile actress who will count this year as the one in which her career took off. She was memorable as Brad Pitt’s wife in “Tree of Life,” and she’ll unveil a powerful performance as the younger version of the former Mossad agent Helen Mirren in the upcoming “The Debt.”
This was a time of change, particularly for the South. The Jim Crow era was coming to an end; the Civil Rights Act was just a couple years away. Yet we don’t get any sense of a shifting society. It’s as if the characters — including Skeeter — have no idea what is going on outside their own kitchens and nurseries. How a woman can go from adoring the woman who might spend more time with her than her own mother to shaming that same woman is unexplored.
We are meant to believe that some women are happy to let their help touch their children all day, feeding, changing, and clothing them, but won’t let those women use their toilets — another seemingly inexplicable paradox unexplained. Skeeter’s book might purport to tell the truth about the help. But “The Help,” with its simplicities, does not.
