The Help
City Cinema Village East, August 16, 2011
Movie #62 for 2011
Aibileen (VIOLA DAVIS, Doubt) is a black woman in Mississippi in the 1960s. It’s not pretty. She’s spent her life raising white children for society mothers and is nearing retirement bitter for it. Skeeter (EMMA STONE, Crazy, Stupid, Love., pictured, left, with Davis) is different from the rest of her raised-rich-and-married-rich social set in that she finished her degree and has returned to Jackson unmarried, and determined to be a writer. She starts with a cleaning tips column for the local paper, getting advise from Aibileen, but soon becomes invested in collecting the stories of hitherto voiceless Aibillen and her fiery friend Minnie (OCTAVIA SPENCER) about their varying-degrees-of-evil bosses.
While Stone and Spencer (who I best remember as the girl who signs Peter Parker up to his wrestling match in Spider-Man) give excellent support, the film belongs to Davis who, as ever, steals it.
The film - and the book is was adapted from - eschews complexity for the feel-good and falls back onto some unhelpful stereotypes in lieu of building characters. BRYCE DALLAS HOWARD (The Lady in the Water, Hereafter) plays the villain as best she can, but she is written without any complexity at all. Nor is the ditzy but big-hearted “trailer trash” wife of a local society fellow played by JESSICA CHASTAIN (Tree of Life). Nor, really, any of them.
The film is entirely about women. Fathers, husbands and suitors are entirely peripheral in terms of both story and cinematography. (Although CHRIS LOWELL, “Veronica Mars”, manages to pull something together out of not much material as Skeeter’s love interest.) The absence of men has the interesting effect of shrinking the world of the film. It’s only ever hinted at that the white women are themselves victims of a broader context of oppression by men. In this tight, closed world, the white women are all-powerful and are either cluelessly naïve or just plain bitchy.
The material goes straight for heartstrings without attempting to engage anything else, like, say, the brain, on its way. What a shame.
