Movie review: The Help ***

And through it all, "The Help" have to maintain a silent stoicism, even when their white employers in 1960s Mississippi mutter about "the colored situation", even when they blurt out the most ignorant and hatefully callous remarks.

The Help is that rare civil-rights melodrama to tell its story from the point of view of faceless, almost anonymous black Southerners who lived through that era. It's based on Kathryn Stockett's best-selling novel about black maids in 1960s Jackson, Miss., the white women they worked for and the new college graduate determined to make a name for herself by writing a book told from the maids' point of view.

Emma Stone (Easy A) is plucky, self-possessed Skeeter, fresh out of Ole Miss and ready to take a job - any job - at the Jackson Journal to get the experience she'll need to work in New York. She is just plain enough to stand out in her circle of well-to-do debutantes-turned-housewives. But she has no interest in following them into matrimony. 

Skeeter turns her household cleaning column into an excuse to chat with her friends' maids. That's where she figures out a pitch to make to a New York publisher (Mary Steenburgen). She'll get the maids to tell their story.

"Nobody ever really talks about it down here," Skeeter says.

The cute struggles with the condemnable in this script as we learn how maids were handed down like house slaves (and kept from pursuing a living elsewhere), how maids sorrowfully passed their careers down to their daughters and how delicate a dance they had to perform to appeal to the racist sensibilities of some of their employers.

Davis and Spencer come to embody the circumscribed and self-censored worlds these women inhabit, with Minny having to explain the rules to her bubbly, lonely and racial barrier-breaking new employer - Celia.

There are distractions, e.g. Skeeter's dating efforts (men, in general, are non-entities here). Despite its occasional cloying moments, The Help transcends its comfort-food-for-Oprah's-Book-Club wrapping to get at something deeper, the gray in a story that seems so far removed as to be utterly black and white.