The Help from Dreamworks Pictures. Directed by Tate Taylor, with Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan producing.
If you haven’t read or heard of The Help, chances are that you’re not a woman, from the South, or know anyone who fits that particular description. Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 runaway bestseller about segregation in 1960s Mississippi, told in part from the perspective of a white woman writing an oral history of the black maids who raise the white children in her town and in part from the perspective of those maids, was about as popular as it was controversial – which is to say, very.
The book centered on Skeeter Phelan, a college graduate who moves back to her hometown, Jackson, Miss., with the intention of becoming a writer but finds herself mired in the same old Junior League petty rivalries. She decides to write a biography of the black housekeepers who work for her friends – women who, despite being forced to use separate entrances and toilets, and subject to some of the most virulent Southern racism, are asked to care for her white friends’ children. One friend’s maid, Abibileen Clark, emerges as an unlikely friend and partner in Skeeter’s attempt to get Black women to speak to her and the story morphs into an improbable marriage of Mean Girls and books like To Kill a Mockingbird.
And now comes the inevitable film version, starring Emma Stone as Skeeter, Viola Davis as Abibileen, and Octavia Spencer as Winny – proving just as controversial as the book, accused of presenting a whitewashed, feel good version of racism in the 1960s American South. Though some important figures have praised the film, including Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers, whose murder outside his Jackson home is touched on in the movie, others have slammed it as damagingly “inaccurate”.
“The issues that faced African-American women were not Real Housewives of Jackson, Mississippi, Mean Girls behavior – it was rape, it was lynching,” Melissa Harris-Perry, Tulane professor and feminist, said on MSNBC.
Nevertheless, the movie opened last weekend, up against apocalyptic critics and crowd pleaser, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and managed to more than hold its own: The film hit the number two spot, taking in more than expected. But is a feel-good movie about what was by and large a dark era in America ever acceptable? Critics are divided.
- It’s ‘icky’. “It’s hard to actively hate The Help, a movie so solicitous of the audience’s favor that it can’t help but win it some of the time,” declared Dana Stevens at Slate.com – Viola Davis, as Abibileen Clark, and Octavia Spencer, as her friend Minny, are outstanding, she noted, and there are tears and laughs in equal measure. It’s just that it feels a bit “icky”, she said. “The Help is a high-functioning tearjerker, but the catharsis it offers feels glib and insufficient, a Barbie Band-Aid on the still-raw wound of race relations in America.” White people in the film are either “sneering bigots” or “pure-of-heart crusaders”, black people “border on saintly stereotypes from a sentimental abolitionist-era novel”. Still, she said, The Help is useful: “The story simplifies and reduces the civil rights movement, yes, but at least it’s about it.”
- Real danger is absent. The bigger problem with the film, already a stripped-down version of the novel, is that the “the film’s candy-coated cinematography and anachronistic super-skinny Southern belles are part of a strategy that buffers viewers from the era’s violence,” claimed Nelson George, a filmmaker writing at The New York Times. “The maids who tell Skeeter their stories speak of the risks they are taking, but the sense of physical danger that hovered over the civil rights movement is mostly absent.”
- Reinforces stereotype. Davis and Spencer both earned plaudits from The Wall Street Journal’s reviewer, Joe Morgenstern, but the film itself, “a pop-cultural tour that savors the picturesque, and strengthens stereotypes it purports to shatter”, did not. The film is bound to be a hit and viewers will flock: “They’ll do so not only for the white guilt it addresses, and deftly mitigates, but for the plot’s entertaining contrivances (chief among them a climax of cyclonic uplift), the bonds of love between whites and blacks and a cast of outsize characters.”
- Feel good movie failed. This movie wants to make its audience feel good and it fails, Dyane Jean Francois wrote at The Huffington Post. “The only positive thing about this movie is that it put several good Black actors on a screen before a wide audience. Maybe this movie will be a vehicle to higher ground for some of them.”
- Actually, this is an “honest movie about race”. Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly’s veteran reviewer, noted, “a liberal message movie about race has the power to divide audiences — and critics — in a special way.” The Help is no different, but, he says, it’s actually a much better movie than liberal critics are claiming, it is “a movie that is tender, biting, honest, surprising, and far, far more curious and morally adventurous about race than many have given it credit for”. Gleiberman continued, “The key to the film’s power, and its originality, is this: It’s a movie not about taking bold crusader’s stands — which, at this point, wouldn’t be a bold movie to make anyway — but about the low-key, day-to-day, highly ambivalent intimacy of black/white relationships in the Deep South.…More than that, what’s refreshing about The Help — and this, I think, is what the critics of it have gotten wrong — is that it doesn’t use white characters as a false entry point of identification for the audience. It is, rather, a sprawling ensemble piece that asks everyone in the audience — black and white, women and men — to identify with everyone on screen.”
- It works. Claudia Pulg, USA Today’s reviewer, claimed that this “sunny and upbeat drama about racial prejudice” works, by personalizing one aspect of black experience and side-stepping sentimentality.
More in reviews
- Rise of the Planet of the Apes
- Cowboys & Aliens – missed opportunity?
- Arrietty
- Crazy, Stupid, Love
- Captain America