The Help

Tate Taylor

The story: The help refers to the African-American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s in the midst of the civil rights movement. Against this backdrop, fresh graduate Skeeter (Emma Stone) persuades her friend’s maid Aibileen (Viola Davis) to tell stories about her life. It is a quiet act of rebellion as what they are doing is against the law. Based on American author Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 debut novel.

It was the little movie that could.

The sleeper hit at the American box office is a US$25 million (S$32 million) drama about women wearing uniforms – without one stitch of superhero spandex in sight. Thus far, it has made US$165 million at the American box office.

Its appeal is easy to see. It is an uplifting tale about a repressed people finding strength in words and stories. Indeed, it is about the power of the pen at a time when Martin Luther King Jr was leading the charge for change.

The irony is that it takes a white woman to spearhead change in Jackson. Stone’s Skeeter has returned home after graduation and is uncomfortable with the casual and pervasive racism she sees in her friends. In particular, queen bee Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard) is proposing a legal Bill to mandate that the black help have to use separate bathrooms.

While we are shown that Skeeter has a close relationship with the maid who raised her, it is not quite clear why her outlook is more enlightened given that her mother (Allison Janney) behaves like everyone else. After all, one of the poignant themes here is that the white children lovingly raised by the black maids eventually model their parents when they grow up. Still, Stone is an appealing actress and she keeps Skeeter likeable even when her motives for talking to the maids in the first place are muddled by her own desire to be published.

There are also strong performances from Davis, who brings dignity and a flash of anger to the role of Aibileen, and Octavia Spencer, as the sassy Minny who cooks up a stomach-turning revenge on her employer Hilly.

Look out also for Jessica Chastain, who goes from saintly mother in Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life (2011) to a lonely social outcast here.

In lesser hands, the characters could easily have come across as cliched types. While scriptwriter-director Tate Taylor has commendably avoided that, he makes it all a little too neat and a tad predictable. The award-winning musical Caroline, Or Change (on Broadway in 2004) similarly explored the social changes in the early 1960s more realistically and with deeper characterisation.

The Help could well trigger some reflection on how the help here – whether they are domestic workers raising children and looking after the elderly folks or foreign workers building towers and digging tunnels – are treated.

(ST)