Culture

Director: Tate Taylor (4/5)

Based on the best-selling book by Kathryn Stockett, The Help was adapted for the screen and directed by Tate Taylor. It’s the late 1960s in Jackson Mississippi and Skeeter (Emma Stone) returns from university to her hometown, which is populated by a group of women who she has clearly outgrown. Although Skeeter sets the movie in motion, The Help is actually the story of Aibileen (Viola Davies), her best friend the feisty Minny (Octavia Spencer) and the treatment they endure from women they work for. These women are southern-fried Stepford Wives, benefit-attending, bridge-club playing stereotypes of Sixties housewives. The irony that this movie so importantly does not miss is that these women, who raise money for starving children in Africa, conveniently ignore the poverty and struggle occurring in their own backyards.
 
“Miss” Hilly Hilbury (Bryce Dallas Howard), the villain dressed in pink frills, neatly shows that a dominating personality and conformity portrayed by friend and fellow housewife, Elizabeth (Ahna O’Reilly), allow the “-isms” in society to flourish. Skeeter, a burgeoning writer, sets out to publish the story of The Help in her town following Hilly’s drafting of a bill that will require whites to build outside toilets for black workers “because they carry different diseases to us”. Published anonymously and written with maids’ and employers’ names changed, there is a communal denial that “that book is not about Jackson, Mississippi, y’all” as each woman tries to avoid the embarrassment of recognition.
 
The Help avoids the really nasty parts of racism in the South, which are only vaguely alluded to in the nature of Hallmark editing, helped by the sunny visual style. The very small tastes of cruelty illustrate exactly what racial segregation in 1960s Southern America was; one big grand illusion. The Help is the perfect mix of cheer and tear, with a little bit of sass for comic value. The story is loyal to the book, generously uplifting and a bit inspiring in the let’s-go-help somebody kinda way. Totally perfect for a bored, weekday, rainy afternoon outing.