The Help [Review by Haus]

The Help can’t help but make a fuss. A tale about civil rights stirrings in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi must tread a fine line, even today: too flip and it risks dismissal as a whitewash; too melancholy and it’s a didactic downer that no one wants to see. Parsi likes this film because he believes — I think rightly — that just because a movie slow-dances with a serious topic doesn’t mean it needs to come off like Schindler’s List.

But neither should it be glib. I don’t think The Help gets this one right.

You probably know the story already — maybe you even read the book — and if you don’t, you can in all seriousness probably glean the gist of it from a glance at the poster. But here goes: Emma Stone, aspiring journalist and writer, seeks to document the tribulations of house maids Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer in still-segregated Mississippi. Much is risked and change is slow, but in the end the baddies get their comeuppance (ladled out here with teen-movie flair in the form of gasp-worthy social gaffes and oh-gawsh cold sores) and the good women walk a little taller.

In a sense it feels unfair to subject this film to much further scrutiny. It’s really just a standard TV-movie arc of courage in adversity and slow triumph over oppression dotted with regular eruptions from feel-good fountain. (Wow. No, that wasn’t meant to be anywhere near as nasty as it sounds.) And it’s quite good — the performances are strong, hearts are warmed, and so on.

But it’s also a movie about racism, class divides, and the South’s reluctant acceptance of the civil rights movement. It’s fair to say these are topics about which most semi-thoughtful people have an opinion, and some people just won’t like this movie. It’s inevitable.

Here’s why I don’t like it: the characters just don’t feel real. There are basically three kinds of women in this movie: the dyed in the wool, down-to-the-bone evil racists, their quivering and unquestioning sheeple followers, and the well-meaning, wholesome, suffer-quietly types with wholly modern sensibilities who, I think, unfairly presage current views on this material.

We’re never in doubt where we stand on these people. And real life just isn’t like that. In real life, you can talk to someone every day for months and get along famously before you realize they happen to be, say, very anti-gay or whatever. Someone who’s just a good all-around buddy to you might well prove an oppressor to someone else. People aren’t all arrayed on a single axis.

Permit me a brief meander. Noam Chomsky once lamented the dangers of concision in journalism. The problem with concision, he reasoned, is that within this framework you can really only repeat established views. Say you’re given a thirty-second interview spot on some program. And say you go on there, parrot the accepted party line, and say something nobody’s going to question. (Choices abound, but for argument’s sake let’s pick a particularly safe one: “Osama was a terrorist.“) The audience just nods in agreement. But now suppose that you instead say something unexpected, something people disagree with, something that contradicts the established view. Your audience will rightly want to hear some evidence in support, and you simply can’t give sufficient evidence in a thirty second window. Thus, people who reinforce the status quo prevail, and anyone else necessarily comes off sounding like a nutjob. The moral here? If someone pops on screen and says “racists are bad,” we all just nod in approval.

And that’s what I disliked about the Help. It’s not bound by concision — but it wastes its 146-minute runtime coasting on our gut reactions to characters that could have been summed up in ten seconds. They’re caricatures writ large. In life, good people sometimes do bad things; bad people sometimes do good. That’s probably part of what makes pervasive oppression and social injustice so resilient. The systems of oppression that undergirded the world shown in this film were surely never so clean-cut.

So reducing this tale to good maids struggling against a heartless housewife does trivialize this material. It’s not that it makes light of racism, and the problem is not that the film is heartwarming or too much fun. It’s that by packaging the oppressor in a wholly detestable character it does a disservice to those who must often fight real villains who are not all bad. And that is a struggle that’s real, tough, and worth telling.

Maybe I’m out in left field here. Maybe all 60s Southern housewives really were cruel, empty, unreasonably attractive beings like Bryce Dallas Howard. Maybe those who followed their lead really were spineless, drooling, image-obsessed sycophants without an original thought under their careful coiffures. I just somehow doubt it.

But you know what? Don’t let all this moping distract you. The Help is actually a surprisingly tender, rich film, well acted and very entertaining. (Jessica Chastain is particularly buoyant as a zany outsider unencumbered by Jackson society’s prejudice.) The Help does scratch around at some very potent paradoxes, like black maids being entrusted to raise whole generations of white children yet forbidden utterly from using the same bathrooms. It also pokes at a thorny issue that persists today: minimum-wage service workers feeling marginalized, that their views simply don’t matter. (See Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent Nickel and Dimed on this score.) It’s a feel-good movie with a dash of race-hate alongside mouth-watering Southern cooking. It’s just all very Hallmark, and it missed a chance to be quite a bit more.

HAUS VERDICT: Good, wholesome, and at times rewarding entertainment. Nicely done for what it is, but it rightly invites criticism for its caricatures of racism in an uneasy South.

See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s view.