“THE HELP”
Based upon the novel by Kathryn Stockett
Written For The Screen and Directed by Tate Taylor
*1/2 (one and a half stars)
Near the conclusion of “The Help,” Writer/Director Tate Taylor’s adaptation of best selling novel, long suffering African American maid Aibileen stares young racist high society member Hilly Holbrook in the face and asks her plainly, “Ain’t you tired?” When that line was uttered, I asked the very same question to myself.
Yes, dear readers, I am tired. I make no apologies for climbing upon any semblance of a soapbox in this matter because I am tired, so exhaustingly tired of seeing films that purport to be about the issue of racism and race relations and yet they are typically so simplistic and handled with such broad strokes. I am tired of seeing a profound lack of compelling African American characters (slightly less so in television yet distressingly so in film) where the fullness of my race is misrepresented, if we are to be represented at all. It is alarming to me that in a year when an African American man exists as the President of the United States, I am still faced with viewing a collective of African American actresses playing subjugated maids for these are the images Hollywood will allow to be seen due to the financial bottom line. Mostly, I am tired of seeing the sorts of stories that claim to be about the experience of African American characters but we are almost always sidelined for the Caucasian leading characters. Look at Sandra Bullock’s Oscar winning performance in her gargantuan hit film “Me And My Pet Negro”…oops…I mean, “The Blind Side” (2010). Was that film about the homeless African American teenage football player or was it really about the good Christian, tart tongued, no nonsense Republican woman who saved him? Who were the film’s advertisement campaigns revolved around? When you think of that particular film, who immediately springs to mind? And again, who was nominated for an Academy Award and therefore, who won the Oscar?
So, here we are again, in 2011 with “The Help,” which is sadly no exception to this sorry, pathetic cinematic epidemic. For a film that dares to address race relations and racism in Mississippi at the dawn of the Civil Rights era, “The Help” is shamefully without nuance or complexity, completely superficial and as subtle with its cornpone sentiments as a sledgehammer to the head. No matter the mammoth box office success and critical accolades the film received and despite those of you who have seen and may have loved this film, with all due respect to all of you, I hated “The Help” and for me and my sensibilities, it was one of 2011’s weakest efforts by a long shot.
Set during the early 1960’s in Jackson, Mississippi, Emma Stone stars as Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a 23-year-old college graduate who returns to her hometown with big dreams of becoming a journalist. Much to the chagrin of her ailing Mother Charlotte (Allison Janney) and her high society friends, which includes Elizabeth Leefolt (Ahna O’Reilly) and the ringleader Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), Skeeter takes a job as a writer of cleaning advice columns at the local newspaper instead of attempting to find herself a husband. While visiting Elizabeth at her home, Skeeter asks if her maid Aibileen (Viola Davis) would be able to offer her assistance with household cleaning tips. Yet, covertly and due to her uncomfortableness with the treatment of the maids within her community, Skeeter inquires of Abilene if she may be able to record her personal stories of her life as a maid in order to potentially write a tell all book, thus exposing the town’s ingrained racism.
Aibileen and the town’s maids, most especially Aibileen’s trusted best friend, the volatile Minny (Octavia Spencer) are initially reluctant to share their stories with Skeeter as the consequences would be understandably dire if they, and the truths within the book, were to be discovered. Yet slowly, and fueled by Hilly Holbrook’s new “Home Help Sanitation Initiative,” a proposed bill that would legally create separate bathrooms for black help staff because of the fear that blacks carry different diseases that white people, Aibileen, Minny and all of the maids begin to confide their tales and inner lives, which Skeeter dutifully documents in their entirety.
Now, as far as the actual story is concerned, there really is nothing inherently wrong with “The Help.” My problems with this film lie firmly in the presentation and execution. First of all, for all of the lip service the film gives to having the maids tell their own stories, you don’t really hear that many of them. Unlike Director Wayne Wang’s excellent adaptation of “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) which allowed audiences to fully walk within the shoes of the Chinese and Chinese-American characters, therefore gaining a window into the world of their lives, “The Help” never travels that deeply. While we do learn some facts and bits about the lives and histories of Aibileen and Minny, and the film carries a few scant sequences narrated by Aibileen, ”The Help” is entirely filtered through Skeeter’s eyes, desires and hopes. As how Hollywood typically handles stories and themes like this one, Aibileen and Minny are shuffled off to the sidelines so we can have ample screen time devoted not only to Skeeter. Additionally, we are given more than enough time to witness the growth and development of Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), a high society outcast who undergoes her own awakening to newfound independence through her experiences with Minny. And frankly, so what? This film is called “The Help” not “Skeeter and Celia” and the people I wanted to know about the most were the ones the film focused upon the least.
To me, “The Help” all felt, once again in a Hollywood movie, that any sense of liberation and freedom the black maids earned only occurred because this young white woman swept in and listened and if she hadn’t arrived, the entire maid community would continue to suffer in silence. God bless you, Skeeter!! For there’s no problem in the black community that could not be fixed by a well meaning, college educated white woman on a mission. “The Help” is just the type of film, albeit a well-intentioned one like Director Norman Jewison’s “The Hurricane” (1999) that is designed to make some white liberals feel good about themselves. The effect is just painfully condescending at best and completely trivial to the experiences of the real African American women who served as maids at worst.
Dear readers, I am not against having leading white characters in stories related to the African-American experience as a rule. I can acknowledge that despite some issues, Director Alan Parker’s “Mississippi Burning” (1988), along with Director Edward Zwick’s “Glory”(1989) and “Blood Diamond” (2006) for instance were all superior motion pictures that dealt with racism and race relations compellingly.
But, I loved films like Writer/Director Lawrence Kasdan’s “Grand Canyon” (1990) even more. That film presented a contemporary story featuring the realities of racism as one of that film’s many themes and a very tentative friendship built between characters portrayed by Kevin Kline and Danny Glover at its core.
But, towering above them all is Spike Lee’s monumental third film “Do The Right Thing” (1989), which for me, is still the greatest exploration of modern day race relations that I have ever witnessed on screen. It was a film simultaneously filled with hilarity, heartbreak, joy and righteous rage and all of it was filtered through characters as vivid as the lives we live everyday. What Spike Lee accomplished so brilliantly within that film, and throughout his career, is that he never pandered to any imaginary audience that may be watching the proceedings of his characters. Therefore, the experience of “Do The Right Thing” was matter of fact and ultimately fearless. It was unconcerned with making a potential audience feel safe or comfortable at the expense of providing the truth.
“The Help,” by contrast was a film that felt to be all too aware of its audience and held the intensely difficult, messy and disturbing topic of race relations at such a safe distance that the film as a whole essentially functioned as a watered down, MOR, completely non-threatening experience that was unwilling to draw blood. As the horrible socialite Hilly Holbrook, Bryce Dallas Howard is presented as such a cartoon racist that any well-meaning audience member would obviously feel superior towards her and that conceit, in and of itself, is a major problem for a film dealing with the topic of racism. In “The Help,” nearly all of the white characters are generally snobbish racists while the black characters are essentially portrayed as noble victims and retribution against racism is depicted through crowd-pleasing toilet humor and an oft repeated joke about the mysterious contents of Minny’s famous chocolate pie which Hilly has consumed. None of the characters are given the difficult complexities of real living and breathing human beings, especially those living in a turbulent time and place. In “The Help,” racism knows nothing but tired clichés and empty homilies about courage and strength. It was so afraid of its own subject matter and riveted to its ultimate aims to keeping the audience feeling comfortable and happy that it sugar coated racism to the point that insulin needed to be administered.
And what a sad shame as “The Help” is a film that is just begging to be explored minutely and profusely due to the multi-layers of the story’s complexities. For instance, one of the film’s most compelling issues and one that was NEVER dealt with in any way, was the motivation for Skeeter’s book and that motivation’s relationship to the maids. I found myself wondering if Skeeter’s intentions were pure. Did she really want to have the maids tell their stories solely to enlighten and educate a larger community with hopes of bringing race relations forwards or was this book just a tool for Skeeter to realize her dreams of becoming a writer? If the motivation was to be found in the latter theory, then Skeeter would be using the maids just as cruelly as the maid’s employers, or even moreso because Skeeter’s actions would have been entirely disingenuous. I think that would have been a worthy issue to examine. Yet, since this is Hollywood, and we have to have a white heroine as a rooting interest, no such complexity arrived. Skeeter is just the latest Hollywood “White Knight” to ride into town and save the poor black folk who cannot save themselves.
Even worse, is the complex issue the film does bother to mention. The fact that the white children who are raised by black women ultimately grow up to become the same black women’s employers and how that cycle is rolled into the cycle of racism is a brilliantly gripping concept to tackle. Now, this could have been the thrust of the entire movie, giving the film a real opportunity to explore race relations and racism along with issues of Motherhood in a provocative fashion. Unfortunately, no such luck.
Aside from those issues I had with “The Help,” there were some of the film’s aesthetics qualities that caused simple but deadly narrative problems. If the film is going to bother spending so much time with Skeeter anyway, then it surprised me with how sloppily it even handled that aspect. For instance, there is the issue of Skeeter’s non-existent love life, which is just the bane of her Mother’s existence. Skeeter gets a date, she suddenly has a boyfriend who then breaks up with her in just a few short scenes that seem to be disconnected from the main plot to the point that those scenes could have been excised from the film and it would not have effected “The Help” whatsoever. There is also the issue of Skeeter’s book. One minute, she's writing on a legal pad in long hand, and the next minute the book has been published and is a literary sensation. The plot holes were distressingly glaring throughout.
Now I have been told by my wife that many of my feelings concerning this film are representative of the source material from which this film is based…and I have not read. Maybe so, but as I have often said on this site, books are books and movies are movies and in translating a book to cinema, a filmmaker has to determine what is needed to represent the story at its very best. I just do not think “The Help” was translated to the screen at its best. Perhaps if the film possessed amore serious tone than the light-footed one it has, that would have helped tremendously. Or maybe the film needed to be more of a three hour epic, where all of the characters could have been examined more thoroughly and truthfully. That would have helped as well.
Look, I do believe that Writer/Director Tate Taylor, Producer Chris Columbus and the entire cast had the very best intentions at heart and desired to do tier best job. I will concede that the film is well made. It is a good-looking work. The performances are all committed yet, Viola Davis is the one person in the entire film that seems to be striving for something stronger, deeper, and more wrenching than this film has any courage to tackle, again quite surprising for all of the talk the characters make concerning the concept of courage.
As stated, my views are filtered through my own personal sensibilities with how African Americans are represented in the movies and which stories are being told. Having yet another image of African American women as maids would be just fine if there were more of a wealth of representations being seen throughout our nation’s movie screen. But that speaks to a larger Hollywood issue that “The Help,” as one movie, could not even begin to rectify. All of that being said, “The Help” failed for me because it felt designed to be a crowd pleaser, leaving the audience with a sense of prefabricated uplift it had never earned in the first place. This is a film that needs to bruise but it all goes down as smoothly as a succulent but innocuous malt shake.
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