Everything about The Help, which details the everyday lives and struggles of black domestic workers in early-1960s Mississippi, is just a little too polished: The cinematography is creamy and radiant, the costumes piggyback heavily on Mad Men-style nostalgia, the white villainesses and heroines are, respectively, too cartoonishly cruel and too selflessly noble. Yet The Help -- which was adapted from Kathryn Stockett's best-selling novel -- is compelling in spite of, not because of, its glossy trappings. It's a popular entertainment that finds its historical footing in the faces of its actors: The Help may not tell us much about the real horrors of the civil rights era, but it does tell us something about the way people lived -- and the way they handled their often conflicting loyalties and resentments -- while those horrors were playing out. In that sense, it's a radical movie masquerading as a tame, inoffensive one.
It's also radical for the way it puts Viola Davis, one of the finest actresses working today, front and center: The scarcity of good lead roles for actresses of color is an ongoing problem in Hollywood, which means that Davis has been largely relegated to smaller, supporting parts. It also means she's stolen movies wholesale from the likes of Meryl Streep -- in Doubt -- and made even the tiniest roles deeply memorable. (In Oliver Stone's 2006 World Trade Center, she played a character billed only as "Mother in Hospital," but the memory of her face is one of the few things I've taken away from that movie.) In The Help, she plays a house maid, the kind of role that African-American actresses used to be relegated to and limited by. But the whole idea of The Help is that a maid isn't just a maid, and Davis and her co-star, Octavia Spencer, breathe life into that idea. These are women with families and heartaches of their own, problems that go deeper than the travails of the women they're paid to serve, which mostly seem to revolve around entertaining and maintaining social status. The "black maid" may be a cliché. But when was the last time we saw a story told from her point of view?
The Help opens with a mighty dose of cliché, though it comes from the hands of a white character: Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) is a well-off Jackson, Miss., girl who's just graduated from college. While all her pals, including the snobby Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) and the fragile, easily cowed Elizabeth (Ahna O'Reilly), are already paired off and starting families, Skeeter wants to have a career as a journalist. She has decided to take down the oral history of Elizabeth's maid, Aibileen Clark (Davis), with the hope of turning it into a book. The movie begins with the opening of a notebook, and the title The Help being scrawled across the top of the first page.
Having spent time away from home, Skeeter sees her environs with new eyes upon her return: She's quietly horrified by the way Hilly refuses to use Elizabeth's guest bathroom because she knows that Aibileen is allowed to use it too. She suggests loudly, and within earshot of Aibileen, that Elizabeth build a separate "colored" bathroom for her servant. When someone points out, gently, that Hilly might be overreacting, she responds robotically, "I'll do what it takes to protect the children."
Later, in a fit of irrational pique -- and against the wishes of her infirm but feisty mother, played by Sissy Spacek -- Hilly dismisses her own maid, Minny (Spencer), who has been with the family for years. Minny fights back by playing a devilish practical joke -- she refers to it by a code name, the "terrible awful" -- but it's hardly enough to quell her resentment toward her former employer. And so she too, after some coaxing, agrees to help Skeeter with her book. The story that unfolds from there makes brief references to real-life historical events -- like the assassinations of Medgar Evers and JFK -- but focuses mostly on the lives of anonymous women, white and black, privileged and struggling, against a vaguely drawn historical backdrop.
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]