REVIEW: Brilliant Viola Davis Lifts The Help Over '60s Gloss

The Help -- directed by Tate Taylor, who also adapted the screenplay -- isn't designed to be a hard-hitting treatise on the civil-rights struggle, although sometimes it all goes down a little too easy. While Hilly's unconscionable racist comments -- and her even more unforgivable actions -- certainly have a basis in real life, they're rendered so large here that they almost lose their meaning. The idea that Hilly's attitudes could be changed -- or even just avenged -- by means of a practical joke is just a little too cushy. The picture might have dug a little deeper to portray the more insidious damage wrought by the Jim Crow laws and by entrenched racism. And the motivations of several characters -- among them Skeeter's mother, played by Alison Janney -- are often too broadly spelled out, just to make the point that perfectly "decent" people can be racist too. There are ways to get that idea across without using the kind of bold Hi-Liter strokes Taylor resorts to here.

Then again, if there were dozens of movies being made today about everyday women's lives during the civil-rights movement, then maybe we could point to one that's superior to The Help. As it is, this is the only one we've got, and the movie's value lies in the way it puts history in the context of day-to-day living, rather than the other way around. Skeeter is less a believable character than a symbol of the enlightened young white person, circa 1963. But those people did exist, and Stone is so appealing that watching her is painless: She never comes off as too sanctimonious, perhaps because she looks so much like a drawing from a vintage kindergarten valentine -- she's just a kid who wants to do the right thing.

Spencer, as the quietly crusading Minny, has some of the movie's best comic moments, though she never lets us lose sight of the justifiable anger and frustration that have come to rule her life. She's particularly lovely in her scenes with Jessica Chastain, who plays Celia, the low-class bride of one of Hilly's former beaus. After hiring the disgraced Minny -- who can't get a job with any other family -- Celia doesn't understand that she's not supposed to befriend the help. The bond that forms between the two women is, perhaps paradoxically, one of the least realistic and yet most believable angles of the movie. Chastain, after playing a dull, saintly mom in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, is allowed to play a human being here, perhaps a grown-up version of the sweet, victimized drifter she played in the little-seen (but well worth watching) Jolene. With her Marilyn Monroe giggle and red-painted toenails, Celia may be something of a caricature, but at least she's wholly alive.

But The Help is Davis's movie, and it's about time. Davis underplays everything, even the movie's big "racism is bad" moments. When she informs Skeeter that she raised "18 babies" -- meaning mostly, of course, white people's babies -- you don't doubt for a minute that they turned out great. When we see Aibileen in action with one of her current charges, the empowerment mantra she keeps repeating to the little girl becomes meaningful not because of the words themselves, but because of the tender conviction she pours into them. And when Aibileen mourns the son that she lost, as the result of negligence at the hands of white people, her suffering comes off as both palpable and delicate, like a fragile bird you could hold in your hand. In terms of its basic plot points, The Help only skates along the surface of one of the most painful and violent periods in our country's history. But in the latitude it allows its performers -- and in the way those performers dig deep into their roles, to find more, perhaps, than what was actually written there -- The Help is anything but conventional. It may not be a work of genius, but it's at least a work of empathy. And in the end, that may be a better thing.

Read Movieline's interview with Viola Davis here.

[Photos: Dreamworks LLC/Dale Robinette]

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