The Help (***1/2)

It’s nearly impossible to review this movie without commenting on what its appearance in theaters, and atop box-office charts, says about American culture. On the one hand, the subject lines of some of the busier Internet Movie Database discussion threads—“Black people need to get over it”; “Not racist”; “Honestly Not Much Has Changed In 50 Years”; “Any minority that likes this movie”; “The Help Was Made For White Audiences”—show how divisive a subject race still is. On the other, had this adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel been made 50 years ago, when it takes place, I doubt that it would have functioned, as I think it does, as a feel-good movie for much of its audience.

Aside from those assuming movies about racism are made only to hector whites, many of the objections boil down to criticizing the Mississippi-set drama for not encapsulating the entire African American experience, which is like criticizing The Godfather for not encapsulating the entire Italian American experience. Some criticize the movie for making a white aspiring journalist (Emma Stone) into the heroine, but Aibileen (Viola Davis), one of the black maids she writes about, is also the heroine. Or they don’t like that the black characters are maids.* But focusing on maids is a reminder of how limited the opportunities were for black women. And it’s nearly impossible to simultaneously show that a people were denied agency and rights and then have them triumph without any assistance from someone with more power. Ultimately, though, any one movie ought to be evaluated in terms of the story it’s trying to tell, and how well it does it.

Fairly seen, although obviously Stone’s Eugenia, a headstrong college girl returning to her hometown, appears to be admirable in depicting the lives of these women, she is not perfect, or without ambition, and the women themselves, and black people generally, are certainly shown to be the primary victims of the embedded system. This story, in its most general outlines, is probably well known to most people, but in fact by showing how the rigid social structure constrained even whites who saw things a different way, the story shows the more subtle ways a social system can repel change. (The social ostracism faced by another white character [played by Jessica Chastain] seems clearly meant to be analogous to the prejudice faced by blacks.)

It’s true that director Tate Taylor uses the character of Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard), petty as well as intolerant, as a kind of living embodiment of Southern intolerance, letting the other characters off the hook, as it were. But there is also the more subtle racism of Eugenia’s mother, and the not-subtle-at-all racism as enforced by the police. In other words, this is not simply a movie about a white savior and one villain, although it is partly that, and, reductive or not, it’s impossible not to be satisfied by (or laugh at) Hilly’s inevitable, grotesque comeuppance.

So, along with its earnest condemnation of a system that hardly anyone defends anymore anyway, the movie offers a juicy, Peyton Place-style melodrama, complete with romantic subplot, of the sort that will never be dated. It’s gossipy while allowing white people to feel — rather than guilt-tripped — superior to their unenlightened forbears and to identify with the forward-thinking, modern-seeming heroine. In that way it peddles racism in an easy package, but that’s not the same as saying it doesn’t show it in a true light. Perhaps many younger people will be shocked to learn that many towns would routinely require, necessitating considerable time and expense, separate facilities for blacks, even to the point of requiring separate bathrooms in private homes. (Such baroque manifestations of segregation are further detailed in Isabel Wilkerson’s recent non-fiction bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns.) And if Hilly is in part a caricature, Eugenia and Aibileen are given enough dimension (and well acted, as are all the parts) that those of any race should be able to identify with them, even if its not via personal experience.

Last, speaking as one who has not read Stockett’s novel,  I’d say Taylor’s done an admirable job of making the story feel complete. Only once, watching Leslie Jordan’s colorful turn as the newspaper editor who hires Eugenia to write a household-hints column, did I think to myself that the book must have had more to say about this character. But even then, it wasn’t out of any sense of something missing, but simply because the hiring scene was so entertaining that I figured there had to be more where that came from.

* Or the way they speak. Aibileen tells her young charge, “You is smart. You is kind. You is important.” To me, though, this was more unrealistic for its appropriation of 1980s self-help-speak than nonstandard dialect.

IMDB link

viewed 9/9/11 at AMC Loew’s Cherry Hill; reviewed September and November 28–29, 2011