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#132 - The Help
Tate Taylor, 2011
In the early 1960s, an aspiring white journalist decides to write a book based on the personal experiences of the black maids who work in a Mississippi town.
It's easy to write this off as yet another "white saviour" movie where a young white woman (Emma Stone) summons the wherewithal to record the plights of working-class black maids in the very racist South for the sake of writing a career-defining book, even though it does result in Stone facing such difficult obstacles such as an extremely shallow male love interest (really, though, the seemingly forced development of their relationship is one of the most ridiculous things about this film) and having a couple of arguments with her obliviously prejudiced mother. Fortunately, the rest of the film has just enough quality in order to make this film tolerable rather than irritating. Extra credit has to go to both Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer as the main maids, even if they do fall prey to a fairly simplistic dichotomy where Davis is the calm, reasonable figure while Spencer is a more emotionally charged character. Davis in particular was rather impressive and now I feel like I should check out The Iron Lady just to see what kind of performance Davis lost an Oscar to, while Spencer definitely earns her Oscar win as a more tempestuous worker who can amaze those in her good books and devastate those in her bad books (and even calls out Stone for trying to write her book on the basis of it being some kind of white saviour nonsense). Bryce Dallas Howard plays a rather striking antagonist whose outwardly pleasant Southern belle exterior makes a great counterpoint to her especially vile and hypocritical prejudices, while Jessica Chastain makes for an interesting counterpart to Howard as a genuinely kind housewife who still has her own set of problems (which are of course helped by Spencer, in what may or may not qualify as an example of what Spike Lee would call a "magical negro").
Given all the ways in which I should've disliked this film - its ultimately basic treatise on race relations being the most obvious, to say nothing of how the best comedic aspects don't quite work (by 2015, the infamous revenge plot has become a fairly well-known twist in its own right) - it's weird that I did kind of like The Help. It's just as well that the core performances are solid enough to carry the rather underweight material over the course of just over two hours. The cinematic technique calls to mind old-school melodrama, which admittedly suits this kind of story, but of course the whole thing is just questionable enough that I don't think it's genuinely great. I thought that the film's ability to find a place on the IMDb Top 250 meant it might just have been good enough to overcome its more obviously problematic elements - while it wasn't that good, it wasn't that bad either.
Tate Taylor, 2011
In the early 1960s, an aspiring white journalist decides to write a book based on the personal experiences of the black maids who work in a Mississippi town.
It's easy to write this off as yet another "white saviour" movie where a young white woman (Emma Stone) summons the wherewithal to record the plights of working-class black maids in the very racist South for the sake of writing a career-defining book, even though it does result in Stone facing such difficult obstacles such as an extremely shallow male love interest (really, though, the seemingly forced development of their relationship is one of the most ridiculous things about this film) and having a couple of arguments with her obliviously prejudiced mother. Fortunately, the rest of the film has just enough quality in order to make this film tolerable rather than irritating. Extra credit has to go to both Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer as the main maids, even if they do fall prey to a fairly simplistic dichotomy where Davis is the calm, reasonable figure while Spencer is a more emotionally charged character. Davis in particular was rather impressive and now I feel like I should check out The Iron Lady just to see what kind of performance Davis lost an Oscar to, while Spencer definitely earns her Oscar win as a more tempestuous worker who can amaze those in her good books and devastate those in her bad books (and even calls out Stone for trying to write her book on the basis of it being some kind of white saviour nonsense). Bryce Dallas Howard plays a rather striking antagonist whose outwardly pleasant Southern belle exterior makes a great counterpoint to her especially vile and hypocritical prejudices, while Jessica Chastain makes for an interesting counterpart to Howard as a genuinely kind housewife who still has her own set of problems (which are of course helped by Spencer, in what may or may not qualify as an example of what Spike Lee would call a "magical negro").
Given all the ways in which I should've disliked this film - its ultimately basic treatise on race relations being the most obvious, to say nothing of how the best comedic aspects don't quite work (by 2015, the infamous revenge plot has become a fairly well-known twist in its own right) - it's weird that I did kind of like The Help. It's just as well that the core performances are solid enough to carry the rather underweight material over the course of just over two hours. The cinematic technique calls to mind old-school melodrama, which admittedly suits this kind of story, but of course the whole thing is just questionable enough that I don't think it's genuinely great. I thought that the film's ability to find a place on the IMDb Top 250 meant it might just have been good enough to overcome its more obviously problematic elements - while it wasn't that good, it wasn't that bad either.