The Help 2011
The South has always struggled with race relations and no place did it strike closer to home, literally, than with black maids helping out white families. The Help takes a look at Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960’s. With segregation going strong, many white families find black maids to clean, cook, and take care of their kids. The problem with this movie is trying to tell this story without being judgemental or just being too obvious. Most of the maids in the movie are mistreated somehow and I don’t know that this was always the case. Certainly many maids were like members of the family, some of which is shown, even though basically it is a working relationship. There were certainly issues though, and the movie delves into them with a cast of mostly charicatured southern debutantes and maids who are starting to realize that the civil rights movement is changing things for them.
Honestly, the movie doesn’t try that hard to make any deep points, which is probably for the better. Instead it gives the maids and the relationships their due, but then moves on to the plot and shows some characters doing funny things. Viola Davis is in a more serious role as a maid who wants something more (and is great, as always) and Octavia Spencer is in a more comic role as a sassy maid (for which she won an Oscar for Supporting Actress). Emma Stone plays a young woman who was raised by a maid and is sympathetic to their plight, even though her friends are the ones hiring maids as they start out new families.
It is decidedly a chick flick, but as a white southerner who grew up with a black maid helping out (not every day), I was interested to see how this system worked. I think that despite the racism and inequality, people of different races had a working relationship at the time, especially in smaller towns. And the movie explores some aspects of that, while keeping a sense of humor. Getting more serious probably wouldn’t have helped, but just focusing on the humor really wouldn’t be right either, so the The Help delicately takes a middle path that is entertaining and rewarding, even though it errs on being a little overly sweet and general. I’ll give it a B+ because there is clearly something missing, but I don’t know exactly how it could have been done better.
Written: 25 Nov 2012
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD