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“These women raise white children. We love them and they love us, but they can’t even use the toilets in our houses.”
Such is the relationship between the coloured help and their white employers in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s. Based on a bestselling novel of the same name, The Help tells the story of Skeeter (played by Emma Stone), an aspiring writer who decides write a book revealing the day-to-day lives of black maids and the racism which they face. She enlists the help of Aibileen (Viola Davis), to tell her story, who in turn recruits Minny (Octavia Spencer), who has just been fired by Hilly Holbrook, head of the Junior League and doyenne of social life in Jackson. As ‘the coloured situation’ deteriorates, more maids come forward to tell their story, despite endangering their lives and their jobs, and the book is eventually published anonymously.
Viola Davis steals the show as Aibileen, the dry, stoical nursemaid, mourning the loss of her son, and who provides most of the film’s emotional impact; Octavia Spencer supplies the comic relief and Bryce Dallas Howard is disturbingly spiteful as society belle Hilly. It is only Emma Stone, the sole household name among the cast, whose performance occasionally falters: her accent tends to slip and she is, on the whole, too self-assured to play gauche, homely Skeeter.
The characters may be pushing for change in the era in which they live, but the costume and set designers have clearly embraced it. As an ‘intellectual,’ Stone is given bad hair, shapeless clothes and glasses, but the other costumes are a delight, beautifully evoking the spirit of the age.
The film sensitively portrays the delicate issue of racism in 1960s America, and explores the complex relationship between black and white: the white employers are neither demonised nor excused, and the conditions in which their maids are forced to live is poignant without being glamorised. Whilst depicting a time of social unrest, Tate Taylor’s screenplay focuses mainly on personal issues (albeit alluding in passing to the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers’s by the KKK). Thus the film is kept undemanding, and the explosive issue of the Civil Rights Movement remains in the background.
This glossing over of the driving political force of the film is its main downfall: it appears overly sanitised and the focus on relationships is sometimes sickly sweet, such as when Mae Mobley, the daughter of Aibileen’s employer, puts her arms around her and whispers ‘You my real mama, Aibey.’
There were several subplots, such as Skeeter’s romance with the drunk and abrasive Stuart, which felt perfunctory and unfinished, but at 146 minutes the film was quite long enough without expanding these any further. In spite of its length, I didn’t want it to end, as the film was a delight from start to finish. Although The Help is light and frothy, the themes of equality, courage and friendship it raises are heart-warming and substantial- much like Minny’s chocolate pie.
See The Help at City Screen. Click here for more information.
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