Davis, Spencer, and Stone make this movie sing.
The Help
is a wonderfully complicated movie. Directed and adapted by Tate Taylor from
Kathryn Stockett's novel, it captures the domestic culture of the affluent South
just as the civil rights era began. But right there the complications begin. In
dealing with a privileged society whose matrons and daughters hew to an exacting
code of social competition, the story presents us with a rigid class and racial
structure that flourished in the pre-1960s South.
Is it
possible that even in the '60s North and South could still be so different one
hundred years after the Civil War? Yes. Could Mississippi society matrons have
believed, in the shadow of the murder of Medgar Evers, that because they ladled
out to their maids a patronizing kindness along with condescension that nothing
whatsoever was wrong with the system? Yes again. While living in Washington D.C.
in 1951, a southern friend professed astonishment at my question and replied,
"But you just don't understand loyalty. The loyalty went both ways." A job
given, a job well done. Any one of these themes mishandled could have turned the
film into parody, but instead, look what happens: a trio of terrific actors
navigates the potential pitfalls with grace.
Skeeter
Phelan ( Emma Stone) has come home from Ole Miss with a hankering to become a
journalist. The hankering soon turns to determination to tell the story of the
society around her. In an extremely perceptive performance, Emma Stone conveys
Skeeter's awareness that she could ruin the lives of the black women she has
approached for their stories. And do you remember Viola Davis in Doubt?
Here, she is at once the anchor and the air. In a performance of great dignity
she plays Aibileen, the first of the help to agree to work with Skeeter. Octavia
Spencer creates Aibleen's friend Minny, a brave and unforgettable character who
repeatedly reaches her personal point of no return.
Bryce Dallas
Howard is Hilly - the awful, hollow Junior Leaguer scratching to hold onto the
top rung of her social ladder, terrified of making a social misstep. If I hadn't
known several of her I would say Howard overacted. There is fine support from
Jessica Chastain as an ostracized outsider, from Allison Janney and Cicely Tyson
- some in mightily unsympathetic parts. And watch Sissy Spacek as Missus Walters
as she finally revels in the awful irony that is her daughter's lifeblood.
But it is the
towering work, shot through with humor but deeply serious, of Viola Davis and
Octavia Spencer that finally makes us understand that the underpinning of this
kind of a society was rooted in ownership - of one human being by another. Their
story here, of those who rule and those who serve, is a footnote to the
convulsion overtaking them in the '60s. Faced with a story about cultural
traditions that took too long to die, Davis, Spencer, and Stone make this movie
sing.
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