DVD review: The Help ***

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14:

The Help ***

Language: English

Genre: Drama

Rating: PG-13

Director: Tate Taylor

Actors: Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard, Mike Vogel

Based on Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 best selling novel of the same name, The Help takes place in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960’s at the dawn of the civil rights movement. The story is told from the vastly different perspectives of the central characters, Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter. Aibleen Clark (Viola Davis) is the middle aged black maid who has just lost her son and who has spent her life raising white children. Minnie Jackson (Octavia Spenser) is Abileen’s confrontational and fiery fellow maid and Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) is the young writer from a prominent white family who writes a book on Jackson’s social elite from the perspective of the help.

Thanks to a talented cast and in particular Viola Davis, The Help is a wonderful family film that elicits a broad range of emotions from sadness to laughter, where the movie falls down is its lack of condemnation for a society organized around the principal of segregation. There are certainly morally reprehensible characters in the movie like Hilly Holbrook a leading Jackson socialite who is obsessed with getting a local ordinance forcing white employers to have separate toilets for their black employees but it is the individual and not the society that is portrayed as villainous. However none of that takes away from the fine acting of Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer who turn in excellent performances. Viola Davis gives the Aibileen character a sense of quiet dignity and self-assuredness that is increasingly rare to see either in movies or in real life. Minnie played by Octavia Spencer often steals the scenes with her characters’ tart mouth directness and provides many of the laughs in the movie. In demand new comer Emma Stone delivers a solid but unremarkable performance as Skeeter, who’s writing the book the movie revolves around.

The Help had the opportunity to depict to a new generation, 50 years removed from the struggles of the civil rights movement, the unjustness of segregation, it however choose to take a safer route and while still worthwhile to watch is not the movie it could have been.