The Help (2011) is bizarrely detached from the emotional, political, and social realities of its subject matter. I use the qualifier, ‘by and large,’ because members of the uniformly outstanding cast are able to wrest compelling moments that capture an authentic character in an authentic place.
Yet you will not learn much about what it was like to live in Jim Crow or what life was like, even on a practical level for maids, from watching The Help. While the film shows that the white employees were bossy and cruel, it fixates on only one specific example of widespread abuse: the refusal of white employers to let black maids use their toilets. A whimsical scene depicting an evil character’s lawn covered in broken toilets exemplifies not only the movie’s childish metaphorical sense but its narrow focus.
Yet you will not learn much about what it was like to live in Jim Crow or what life was like, even on a practical level for maids, from watching The Help. While the film shows that the white employees were bossy and cruel, it fixates on only one specific example of widespread abuse: the refusal of white employers to let black maids use their toilets. A whimsical scene depicting an evil character’s lawn covered in broken toilets exemplifies not only the movie’s childish metaphorical sense but its narrow focus.
The movie has a narrative problem: it’s about an author, Skeeter (Emma Stone, who is excellent) compiling the stories of maids instead of being about the stories themselves. If Skeeter is both protagonist and framing device, as I believe she’s intended to be, the story that it’s framing is never depicted. For example, just as Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) tearfully begin monologues about what it’s like to work for vicious white ladies, the scene abruptly terminates. One stunted depiction involves an accusation of thievery that results in the arrest of an ancillary maid character, who is never seen from or heard from again. The film supplies its historical context with radio broadcast snippets, newsreel footage, and expository asides. Injustice is not so much systemic as singular - personified in Bryce Dallas Howard’s white employer, who is about as threatening as any teen movie’s cliquey mega-bitch.
The Help is, in very plain terms, a chick flick. It incorporates such staples of thegenre as the plucky, ugly duckling heroine; the gaggle of catty girls; outrageous, gross-out, comedic moments; the unlikely and convenient nature of the protagonists’ triumph; a contemporary and self-conscious eye for style, hair, and makeup; the annoying but actually kind-hearted parental figure. Tate Johnson seems more concerned with adhering to the formulas of today’s mass-marketed cinema than he does in exploring the structures of the past.
Note: Melissa Perry-Harris has an erudite, fair-minded yet passionate critique of The Help.
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