I started getting worried about this movie right from the
opening frame. Whenever I know I’m going into a film that has been adapted from
a book, the first red flag I look for to tell me that I’m watching a lazy
adaptation is voice over narration. Sure enough, the first thing that The Help gives us is a wise old voice
telling us where we are and setting up the story that we’re going to be told.
Film is a visual medium, and the way to best tell a story using it differs very
wildly from how you best tell a story in a book, which is pure language. The
trick when it comes to successfully adapting a book into a film is to stay true
to the heart of the story, but to find a way to convey it through your
photography and the performances of your actors rather than just copying the
text of the book and pasting it into a voice over narration. If I wanted
somebody to tell me a story, I would have stayed in nursery school. If you’re
not going to do something new with your source material, then what is the point
of adapting it? Just recommend people the book. That said, the narration in The Help isn’t pervasive enough to sink
the film, but it speaks to my biggest problem with it; the script is clunky and
bloated. When making the choices necessary in adapting the Kathryn Stockett
novel into a movie, it seems to me that writer/director Tate Taylor didn’t make
any choices at all.
The Help tells the
tale of a group of African American housemaids working in Jackson Mississippi
during the 60s. Largely the women
are soulful, salt of the Earth sources of compassion and wisdom. The white
families that they work for are thoughtless, ignorant, and unable to do
anything for themselves. Most of the white characters that we spend time with
are young housewives. These women are racist gossips who mindlessly follow the
social norms they were raised with and are pretty indistinguishable from one
another if they were lined up. Except for Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma
Stone), she went to college and has curly hair. Because of her education and
one distinguishing physical feature, she is our defacto protagonist, the one
character who becomes racially sensitive, and the eyes through which we view
the mystical, mysterious black part of town. I’m being a bit condescending
during this plot summary, but that’s only because the film itself is overly
simplistic and one dimensional in its views on race relations. It tries for
poignant, but really only ever accomplishes cute (or, more cynical eyes might
argue condescending). Fortunately, for many audiences, cute is enough to get
the job done.
The real problem I had with The Help wasn’t its concept, but its execution. Most of the film’s
big moments played as clunky and manipulative. Not only do we get the narration
that tells us how we’re supposed to be feeling about things rather than letting
us decide on our own, but we also get a lot of pointed monologuing that plays
over generically dramatic music. Especially during several embarrassingly
handled flashback sequences, The Help lacks
any semblance of subtlety. And at two hours and seventeen minutes, after a
while it starts to look a little long in the tooth. There are several subplots
that don’t directly relate to the main plot of the maids helping Skeeter write
a tell-all book about their lives, and they felt like the screenwriter paying
lip service to fans of the source material rather than doing what is best for
his film. There are two, one in which Skeeter tries to find romance, and one in
which one of the maids suffers physical abuse at the hands of her husband, that
felt like they should have been important to the film’s resolution, but weren’t.
They should have been excised to keep things moving.
The one-dimensional, manipulative, half-baked nature of this
movie could perhaps not be better personified than in the character of Hilly
Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard). She’s the ringleader of the posh bridge club
that most of our drama centers on, and a large part of the conflict stems from
her drafting of a resolution that all white homes employing black help should
be required to provide them with their own toilet facilities, separate from the
house. You know, to stop the spread of all the infectious diseases that black
people carry. I have trouble remembering the last time I’ve seen such an
irredeemable, one-note villain in a film. In the hands of Howard and Taylor,
Hilly Holbrook contains no multitudes, no shades of gray; she’s here simply to
represent an ultimate evil that our protagonists can rail against. She more
resembles the evil queen from Snow White than
anyone you would actually meet in Mississippi.
Fortunately, that’s where the bad performances in the film
end. Everyone else who gets a major role knocks it out of the part, and largely
it is the quality of the performances that elevate what should have been
something contemptible up to middling ground. Viola Davis gets a lot of the big
moments as the main maid we are introduced to, Aibileen Clark, and she’ll
probably walk away from this one getting most of the acclaim. Honestly, it’s
pretty deserved, as she’s really great in the role and she projects an
authoritative presence that few actors could match. Her character gets the biggest
journey to travel, and as you watch her reach her lowest moments and then rise
above the hardships you will be with her every step of the way. The other maid
character that gets a lot of screen time is Minny Jackson, and she’s played by
a comedic force of an actress named Octavia Spencer. When The Help isn’t trying to jerk tears out of your ducts, it spends
the rest of its time going for belly laughs, and every one that actually hits
comes from Spencer. She gives good sass, and I wouldn’t be surprised if “Minny
don’t burn chicken” took off as a catch phrase. The other supporting
performance that is worth mentioning came from Jessica Chastain. She plays the
only other white character other than Skeeter that doesn’t fit in, Celia Foote,
and she’s pretty magnetic in the role. Foote is treated as the default town
floozy because she’s ample of chest and not very bright, but she’s actually got
a really big heart and is a breath of fresh air when juxtaposed with the other
frigid Stepford Wives we’re forced to spend time with. Chastain really goes for
it, and her performance is admittedly a little too much, but she’s so committed
to the character that you can’t help but root for her.
My favorite aspect of this film, and its biggest redeeming
factor in my eyes, is its casting of Emma Stone as Skeeter. Stone is pitch
perfect every second that she’s on screen and she really makes something of a
character that I’m sure played as little more than an archetype on the page.
This might be the best role I’ve seen her in when it comes to displaying her
potential as an actress. Skeeter is largely just the vehicle through which the
film’s fairy tale world of wise old maids is introduced to us, but in Stone’s
hands she becomes a fleshed out person who we really care about. The light moments,
the heavy moments, they all look effortless when handled by this actress. Stone
doesn’t just have the chops to be successful in the acting world, she has an
“it” factor that could lead to her becoming one of the biggest stars on the
planet. She’s funny enough and cute enough to get guys to like her, and she
always shows enough vulnerability and remains relatable enough to woo the girls
in the audience as well. So far she has chosen the perfect roles to continue
endearing herself to the public, and I would be surprised if she wasn’t soon
spoken about in the same breath as, at least, a Julia Roberts. So, if you’re
going to go see The Help for any
reason, see it for Emma Stone. But I can also recommend it to most people
because, despite its flaws, I can’t deny that it’s an effective film. The big
laughs are gotten though really easy gross-out gags, and the big emotional
moments are achieved through tear jerking manipulation; but that doesn’t change
the fact that the audience I saw this with was laughing a lot and crying a lot.
If they could have chopped about twenty minutes off of the run time I probably
would have even bumped it up to a four star rating.
