The Help (2011)
Certified: 12
Duration: 146 minutes
Directed by: Tate Taylor
Starring: Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Sissy Spacek, Mike Vogel, Allison Janney, Chris Lowell
KRS release
The Help has all the right ingredients to be among the nominees for the upcoming Academy Awards: a shiny cast and a message to get across.
The film is an adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s popular 2009 book that has sold over five million copies and has been placed on many a critic’s top 10 for the year.
The movie version seems destined to follow in the same footsteps. The predominantly female cast pull out all the stops to charm their audience and give them an insight into what it meant to be a black woman in Mississippi in the 1960s.
Fresh from college, Skeeter (Emma Stone) returns home to her sick mother Charlotte (Alison Janney) and father Robert (Brian Kerwin) in Jackson, Mississippi.
Here she aims to get a job at a newspaper. When she arrives, she finds that their long time housekeeper Constantine (Cicely Tyson) has been fired and no one is saying why.
She meets up with her old friends, Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Elizabeth (Ahna O’Reilly), who have since married while Elizabeth has also become a mother.
Skeeter finds their racist behaviour off-putting. She pities the housekeepers that work for them: Aibeleen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) and feels terrible for them.
She had always wanted to be a writer and so starts to write down their stories.
This would serve to get her published but also to act as a catalyst for the social change she desires. New York editor Elaine Stein (Mary Steenburgen) is soon attracted to the work.
However, Skeeter does not find it easy to get their stories. Minny was recently fired by Hilly who placed her mother (Sissy Spacek) in an old people’s home. She then finds employment with the town pariah “white trash” Celia (Jessica Chastain).
Aibeleen tries to hold onto her job with Elizabeth, because she does not like how she treats her little child.
Meanwhile, Skeeter starts getting involved with a local gentleman, Stuart (Chris Lowell), who may not be the man she thinks he is. When the book titled The Help written by “Anonymous” is published, all their lives are thrown into disarray.
The Help is directed in a no-frills, clean manner, showing how much Tate Taylor is still filling his directorial bag of tricks.
But this is compensated for by the emotional proceedings that will inevitably carry you with them.
The production also coaxes some really fine and deep acting from the cast with the likes of Bryce Dallas Howard, Minny Jackson and Viola Davis all pitting in for an Oscar nomination.
Emma Stone, one of the best of the recent spate of up-and-coming actresses, plays Skeeter with all the naïveté that the character requires.
Her role of the “white girl who saves black women” could have so easily gone wrong but she more than ably tackles it down to a hilt.
This is quite a revelation since up till now Ms Stone seemed to be tapping solely into her comic skills and this dramatic turnout delivers the promise that the actress has much more versatility than meets the eye.
We have seen many epic films on racism in America. The Help tackles the same subjects but in a different manner.
We get a more intimate view of how people lived and the focus is on the emotional level rather than on an epic one.
The Help is a crowd pleaser and gives the audience a lot of moments where tears can be shed and resounding applause can be clapped. That is a perfect recipe for success.