The Help

Synopsis: Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone) has just graduated from a Mississippi university at a time when the civil rights movement is emerging. She wants to become a journalist. Landing a job writing a cleaning column for a Jackson newspaper, she enlists the help of her best friend’s maid, Aibileen (Viola Davis). Gradually Skeeter wants to know more about what it is like to be a black maid, raising white people’s kids, and so she embarks upon an ambitious writing project interviewing first Aibileen, and then her best friend, Minnie (Octavia Spencer). As more maids get involved in the project, there will be far-reaching ramifications for both the tight-knit black community and the white Southerners.

I hate it when films get the appellation “chick flick” and undoubtedly this one will. But it is surely a film that can delight the hearts of both sexes, so fine is the cast of women, and so amazingly touching the tale.

Based on a best-selling book of the same name, The Help is also the title of the book that Skeeter is writing about the women that are the backbone of the film. It is Aibileen’s voice-over that tells us much of the heart wrenching stuff we need to know about these women who bring up white babies, say goodbye to them all only to watch them grow up into racists like their mothers (who don’t see themselves as racist!). In the face of this, the relationship between Aibileen and Minnie is at once funny, touching and charming, even if at times it also seems a touch clichéd.

The white southern belles are portrayed as narrow-minded bigots. Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard) was brought up as a baby by Minnie and now she has her own children. She is one hard-as-nails woman, spearheading a ‘sanitation initiative’ in which she pushes for black maids to have their own toilets built, as she sure as hell won’t have Minnie use hers, even though Minnie can bring up her child. Hilly’s fellow-believers are just as entrenched in their own white world, and the universe of these women with their hairdos, frocks, fund-raisers and pie baking is well observed. In contrast to them, when Minnie is fired for giving cheek she goes to work for Cecilia Foote (Jessica Chastain), regarded by the other women as a cheap tart, but who, unsurprisingly, treats Minnie like a human being.

Some of the older white women are also a little different in attitude. Skeeter’s mother, Charlotte (Alison Janney), has cancer, whilst Hilly’s mother, Missus Walters (Sissy Spacek), is growing senile but both are able to see beyond the barriers of racial prejudice that constrain much of the Southern society.  Emma Stone is wonderful as Skeeter. Her heart is huge, her intelligence well beyond that of her peers, and she is, unusually, prepared to put career before marriage and babies. Stone’s performance, along with those of Davis and Spencer, light up the screen.

The 1960s soundtrack is a winner, costumes, cars, baked goods and men look just right for the times, and despite its very long running time, The Help held me captivated throughout. Even if it did cause me to soak copious tissues I didn’t feel emotionally manipulated, just inspired that some people actually have the courage to change the world, and the hearts to love regardless of what society says.  That makes this, for me at least, a film well-worth seeing.

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