The Help keep right on helping
Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in "The Help."
“The Help” is a safe film about a volatile subject. Presenting itself as the story of how African-American maids in the South viewed their employers during Jim Crow days, it is equally the story of how they empowered a young white woman to write a best-seller about them, and how that book transformed the author’s mother. We are happy for the two white women, and a third, but as the film ends it is still Jackson, Mississippi and Ross Barnett is still governor.
Still, this is a good film, involving and wonderfully acted. I was drawn into the characters and quite moved, even though all the while I was aware it was a feel-good fable, a story that deals with pain but doesn’t care to be that painful. We don’t always go to the movies for searing truth, but more often for reassurance: Yes, racism is vile and cruel, but hey, not all white people are bad.
The story, based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-seller, focuses on Skeeter Phelan ( Emma Stone ), a recent college graduate who comes home and finds she doesn’t fit in so easily. Stone has top billing, but her character seems a familiar type, and the movie is stolen, one scene at a time, by two other characters: Aibileen Clark ( Viola Davis ) and Minny Jackson ( Octavia Spencer ).
Both are maids. Aibileen has spent her life as a nanny, raising little white girls. She is very good at it, and genuinely gives them her love, although when they grow up they have an inexorable tendency to turn into their mothers. Minny is a maid who is fired by a local social leader, then hired by a white-trash blonde. Davis and Spencer have such luminous qualities that this becomes their stories, perhaps not entirely by design.
The society lady, Hilly Holbrook ( Bryce Dallas Howard ), is a relentless social climber who fires Minny after long years of service. The blonde is Celia Foote ( Jessica Chastain , from “ The Tree of Life “), who is married to a well-off businessman, is desperate to please him, and knows never learned anything about being a housewife.
Minny needs a job, and is happy to work for her. Celia wants her only during the days, when her husband is away, so that he’ll think he’s eating her cooking and enjoying her housekeeping. Minny helps her with these tasks and many more, some heart-breaking, and fills her with realistic advice. Chastain is unaffected and infectious in her performance.
Celia doesn’t listen to Minny’s counsel, however, when she attends a big local charity event (for, yes, Hungry African Children), and the event provides the movie’s comic centerpiece. Celia’s comeuppance doesn’t have much to do with the main story, but it gets a lot of big laughs. Some details about a pie seem to belong in a different kind of movie.
Skeeter convinces Aibileen and then Minny to speak frankly with her, sharing their stories, and as the book develops so does her insight and anger. A somber subplot involves the mystery of why Skeeter’s beloved nanny, who worked for the family for 29 years, disappeared while Skeeter was away at school. Her mother ( Alison Janney ) harbors the secret of the nanny’s disappearance, and after revealing it she undergoes a change of heart in a big late scene of redemption.
Two observations, for what they’re worth. All the white people in the movie smoke. None of the black people do. There are several white men with important speaking roles, but only two black men, including a preacher, who have much to say.
There was a 1991 movie named “ The Long Walk Home ” that starred Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek as a maid and her employer at the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It had sharper edges than “The Help.” But I suppose the Stockett novel has many loyal readers, and that this is the movie they imagined while reading it. It’s very entertaining. Viola Davis is a force of nature and Octavia Spencer has a wonderfully expressive face and flawless comic timing. Praise, too for Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard and Alison Janney. They would have benefitted from a more fearless screenplay.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
- Ahna O’Reilly as Elizabeth Leefolt
- Jessica Chastain as Celia Foote
- Mike Vogel as Johnny Foote
- Chris Lowell as Stuart Whitworth
- Anna Camp as Jolene French
- Sissy Spacek as Missus Walters
- Viola Davis as Aibileen Clark
- Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson
- Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly Holbrook
- Cicely Tyson as Constantine Jefferson
- Emma Stone as Skeeter Phelan
- Mary Steenburgen as Elaine Stein
- Allison Janney as Charlotte Phelan
Based on the novel by
- Kathryn Stockett
Written and directed by
- Tate Taylor
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‘the help’: film review.
Actresses Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer dominate Tate Taylor's adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's civil-rights era novel about Southern maids and their testy relationships with white female employers.
By Kirk Honeycutt
Kirk Honeycutt
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The Help Film Still Emma Octavia Viola - H 2012
In his first major studio production, The Help , writer-director Tate Taylor enters a minefield of sociological, historical and artistic booby traps. The setting is 1963 Jackson, Mississippi, where racial tensions simmer between African-American maids and their white employers at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Through cruel words and haughty gestures privileged white women communicate disdain for their black help while the maids seethe at the casual insults delivered almost daily.
Taylor does capture the Jim Crow era and its anxieties well, but his characters tend toward the facile and his white heroine is too idealized. The film also seems as if it were made in a void of cinematic ignorance, as if no motion picture of that or any other era ever tackled this topic. Consequently, there is almost nothing new here that filmmakers, novelists and historians haven’t picked over years ago. Indeed Jackson, Mississippi, along with Selma, Alabama, is still struggling to overcome being a geographic byword for Southern resistance to civil rights and human dignity.
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Where The Help succeeds magnificently though is in character portraits by actresses Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer. They play maids who agree to tell their stories to a young white journalist, “Skeeter” Phelan ( Emma Stone ), who means to write a book to demonstrate that racism doesn’t just mean denial of education and voting rights.
Davis’ Aibileen Clark is the epitome of deferential politeness with a “m’am” at the end of every utterance. Yet her eyes speak volumes about the pain and anger she feels. She embodies the strange contradiction experienced by many a black maid or nanny who suffers abuse at the hands of white employers yet has lavished boundless love and devotion on the 17 white children she has raised. However, bitterness has crept into her soul since the death of her beloved son.
Meanwhile Spencer’s scrappy Minny Jackson, Aibileen’s best friend and the best cook in the county, provides not only comic relief but a feistiness that shows that some maids found the gumption and means to get back at overbearing employers. Hers is a great character, the antithesis of Gone With the Wind’s Mammy, and she nearly upends this movie with her righteous sass.
The film, based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett, takes place in the world of Southern women. The white men may rule the world but not their own households so they are deliberately marginalized here. The chauvinism they display toward their wives or girlfriends sets up a chain reaction where the white women take their own insecurities and inadequacies out on the black help.
This is all well and good up to a point, but Taylor verges uncomfortably into cliché when he insists all wisdom and long-suffering nobility resides within the black nannies while the Southern belles of the country-club set are either witches, such as Bryce Dallas Howard ’s impossibly villainous Hilly Holbrook, or weak-minded go-alongers such as Allison Janney’s Charlotte Phelan, Skeeter’s mother, who cannot stand up to Hilly’s bullying.
Another female character who starts off like a cliché, Jessica Chastain ’s dumb blonde Celia Foote, blossoms into an accidental heroine, a social outsider in Jackson whose homemaking conspiracies with maid Minny demonstrate that some white Southerners were color-blind even then.
Ditto that for Sissy Spacek’s dotty, hard drinking old lady although at times she seems like a refugee from a minor Tennessee Williams play. Which leaves the problem of the film’s actual protagonist.
With a name like Skeeter, you can expect this 22-year-old to be a rebel and troublemaker. Nothing accounts for her color-blindness other that she is right-minded —and a writer. For, naturally, a novelist would assume a fellow writer is above such pettiness as racism and class snobbery.
Stone is one of our very best young actresses and she acquits herself well in this role. She makes you imagine that this might be how Scout from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird might have turned out had she become a journalist: Too inquisitive, sensitive and empathetic not to brush aside the common wisdom of the day to see eternal truths about human beings.
There are small moments in the film though that make you long for a movie that is not so deep-dish serious and self-conscious, a contemporary movie that could take advantage of the viewpoint of a half century to look at the past with a kind of cock-eyed grace such as Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven or even the TV series Mad Men . These moments come when you see a maid absurdly vacuuming a large stuffed bear or when one opines: “Love and hate are two horns on the same goat.” Now that’s the spirit!
But, no, the film falls too much in love with its vintage cars, period hairdos, quaint customs and ubiquitous cigarettes. It lingers a tad too long on the Colored Only signs and Confederate flags. It makes its points with set design and camera movements rather than fully explore the never-ending puzzlement of human malice and ignorance.
Opens: August 10 (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures) Production companies: Touchstone Pictures and DreamWorks in association with Participant present a Reliance Big Entertainment/Imagenation Abu DabiFZ/1492 Pictures production Cast: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Allison Janney, Jessica Chastain, Mary Steenburgen , Sissy Spacek, Mike Vogal, Chris Lowell , Cicely Tyson , Aunjanue Ellis Director/screenwriter: Tate Taylor Based on the novel by: Kathryn Stockett Producers: Michael Barnathan, Chris Columbus, Brunson Green Executive producers: Jennifer Blum, Mohamed Khalaf Al-Mazrouel, Nate Berkus, L. Dean Jones Jr., John Norris, Mark Radcliffe, Jeff Skoll, Tate Taylor Director of photography: Stephen Goldblatt Production designer: Mark Ricker Music: Thomas Newman Costume designer: Sharen Davis Editor: Hughes Winborne PG-13 rating, 146 minutes
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Help review: a poignant and angry drama set in a care home
Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham star in this powerful pandemic film
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Writer Jack Thorne wanted to make us angry about the way care-home residents were “all but abandoned” when the pandemic struck in 2020 – and he has certainly succeeded, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph .
Help is a film “brimming with humanity”, featuring great performances from Jodie Comer as Sarah, a newly qualified carer at a home in Liverpool, and Stephen Graham as Tony, a resident with early-onset Alzheimer’s. There are funny and poignant scenes showing the pair’s growing bond – and then the virus strikes, brought in by a patient discharged from hospital to free up beds, despite the Government’s promise that it has thrown a “protective ring” around care homes.
The film’s power comes from its “honesty, soul and almost documentary-like realism”, said Carol Midgley in The Times . Patients drop like flies, while staff are forced to work without PPE. Then, as the staff too fall ill, Sarah is left to cope single-handedly on a 20-hour shift. It’s an “eviscerating” scene, and deeply shaming. The final act, in which Sarah breaks Tony out, is less “convincing”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian . But that hardly detracts from the power of the rest.
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