Not exactly “Roots” or “The Color Purple,” “The Help” is feel-good, middle-brow entertainment about race and women in the Civil Rights-era American South.
It’s going to be understandably pilloried by some for making a white person the heroine. But the film, based on the 2009 bestselling debut novel by Kathryn Stockett, has plenty of strong black female characters as well.
The action is set in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s, where Jim Crow is alive and well. Public toilets and fountains are labeled “White” and “Colored.” Well-to-do white babies have been raised for generations by slave women and then by free, but oppressed black maids, while the babies’ lacquer-haired mothers do whatever they please, which appears to be playing roles in an enormous soap opera and driving Cadillacs.
Enter Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone in a series of mildly distracting strawberry-blond wigs), whose “real” mother is an absent maid named Constantine Jefferson (the venerable Cicely Tyson). Skeeter has gone to college and gotten herself an education. She yearns to be a journalist (Don’t do it, girl) and gets a job writing a house-cleaning tips column anonymously for the comical editor of the Jackson Journal (a nice, if typically hammy turn from scene-stealer Leslie Jordan).
At the same time, we are introduced to Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer). Aibileen works for a young woman (Ahna O’Reilly), who largely ignores her plain-looking young daughter. Even the child tells Aibie she is her “real” mother.
Minny’s employer is fiercely racist Junior League president Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard). Hilly is this film’s stock-character wicked witch, campaigning against allowing maids to use toilets in their employers’ homes for “sanitary” reasons, and Howard goes for it like a champ, practically flying around on a broomstick.
The bane of Hilly’s existence, outside of toilets and maids, is her “white trash” romantic rival, Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain of “The Tree of Life”), the local, widely ridiculed blond bombshell. The real trouble begins when Skeeter gets Aibileen and Minny to reveal what it’s like to be a maid in Jackson for a potentially explosive, racially tinged tell-all.
Adapted and directed by Tate Taylor of the also extremely well-cast “Pretty Ugly People” (2008), “The Help” is historical kitsch, but thanks to a great cast it’s a good old time.
It’s going to be understandably pilloried by some for making a white person the heroine. But the film, based on the 2009 bestselling debut novel by Kathryn Stockett, has plenty of strong black female characters as well.
The action is set in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s, where Jim Crow is alive and well. Public toilets and fountains are labeled “White” and “Colored.” Well-to-do white babies have been raised for generations by slave women and then by free, but oppressed black maids, while the babies’ lacquer-haired mothers do whatever they please, which appears to be playing roles in an enormous soap opera and driving Cadillacs.
At the same time, we are introduced to Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer). Aibileen works for a young woman (Ahna O’Reilly), who largely ignores her plain-looking young daughter. Even the child tells Aibie she is her “real” mother.
Minny’s employer is fiercely racist Junior League president Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard). Hilly is this film’s stock-character wicked witch, campaigning against allowing maids to use toilets in their employers’ homes for “sanitary” reasons, and Howard goes for it like a champ, practically flying around on a broomstick.
The bane of Hilly’s existence, outside of toilets and maids, is her “white trash” romantic rival, Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain of “The Tree of Life”), the local, widely ridiculed blond bombshell. The real trouble begins when Skeeter gets Aibileen and Minny to reveal what it’s like to be a maid in Jackson for a potentially explosive, racially tinged tell-all.
Adapted and directed by Tate Taylor of the also extremely well-cast “Pretty Ugly People” (2008), “The Help” is historical kitsch, but thanks to a great cast it’s a good old time.
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