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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

MOVIE REVIEW
The Help
Storytelling, Maid To Order In 1963 Mississippi


Emma Stone as Skeeter, Octavia Spencer as Minny and Viola Davis as Aibilene in Tate Taylor's drama "The Help".  Dale Robinette/©DreamWorks LLC
  
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        FOLLOW                                            TWEET
Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Tate Taylor directs "The Help", based on Kathryn Stockett's fiction best-seller about a group of black maids in 1963 Mississippi who take a stand against their white female employers after years of mistreatment.  The drama opened across the U.S. today.

The maids, known thanklessly as "the help", endure racism and other indignities in Mississippi at the hands of white housewives often ensconced in their hatreds or trivial affairs to the point of neglecting their own children.  When insults, accusations, firings and humiliations accumulate frustrations among the maids boil over.  A white writer (Emma Stone, terrific here as Skeeter) who responds to letters sent to a local newspaper, takes to writing and publishing anonymous stories from the women who complain.

For all its well-meaning endeavor "The Help" is a predictable, squeaky-clean entertainment that often feels tidy, polite but unruly.  Characters stumble upon and feel out each other in ways that are cautious for the sake of 21st century audiences rather than honest for the film's time period.  Mr. Taylor occasionally puts race and racism at a safe distance, dramatizing it in stereotype.  Oddly "The Help" feels sanitized, stagey, more theatrical than authentic.  The director has several challenges, and has to balance issues of race with variables that won't suppress audience turn-out but the scales are tipped too much in the "safe" direction.

I haven't read Ms. Stockett's same-titled novel but understand it was very closely followed for the film.  If so, Mr. Taylor's lush, sunny effort makes a mistake because "The Help" lacks focus when traversing several avenues.  When it becomes multiple stories about housewives, a writer, a writer's mother, and a romance, it becomes a film altogether different from what its title trumpets.  As adaptations go, what's good for literary purposes isn't always the best prescription for the big screen, and Mr. Taylor's showy film may be its own biggest casualty.  Maybe "Tapestry" (not Carole King's album) would have been a better title.

The serious subject matter of "The Help" is diluted if not trivialized by farcical proceedings which, though very funny on occasion, don't venture beyond caricatured trappings.  This truism is reflected in the work of Octavia Spencer (as Minny) and Bryce Dallas Howard (as Hilly), work that, while entertaining, is rooted in cardboard stereotype.  Both performances are stilted to serve as the film's chief polarizing figures.  There are moments of pain, truth and inspiration but these are as sparse and obligatory as they are sincere.  We also glimpse class differences as a subtext.

"The Help", which features Viola Davis in a tentative performance as Aibilene, the nominal title character but peripheral figure, implants racial views in its most stocked types than in their nuanced counterparts.  I wondered if this was intended as a pre-emptive buttress against any audience objection to the film's racial commentary being too fierce or genuine.  When one black maid speaks of her "fried chicken" and rolls her eyes in exaggeration, it's more cringe-worthy than funny.  Ms. Spencer's Minny character is a safety valve for audiences to laugh with or at, comic relief and nostalgic film figure more than touchstone for the film's weightier issues.

Granted, "The Help" has a sense of its time and history but there's inconsistency in its flavor, tone and mood, all of which constantly shift and disrupt the story.  Strangely, I found the maids and their stories less compelling than they should have been in a film that, at an exhausting two hours and 17 minutes, is at least half an hour too long.  "The Help" needed help in the editing room.  Had this ambitious, wandering film been pared down to two stories and spent less time calculating its every move, it would have made for a smoother, less mannered experience.

What Mr. Taylor's film does well however, and memorably, is weave a fine tapestry of relationships between the women involved.  At its heart are good performances from Allison Janney as Ms. Stone's mother, and Ms. Spacek, amusing and touching as an Alzheimer's-afflicted Southern matriarch.  Ms. Spacek manages to milk extended mileage out of the same punchline no less than four times.  Jessica Chastain showcases blonde "bimbo" parody in exaggerated, physical full-throttle style as Celia, a 180-degree turn from her work in "The Tree Of Life", though it's a turn that while cute overstays its welcome.  Cicely Tyson wears pain and pride on her face in a small, effective role, lending weight with a performance that belongs to another film.

Scattershot, Mr. Taylor's film, which he also wrote, is narrated by Ms. Davis, then by someone else.  The question I kept asking myself was, "Whose story is this?  Whose perspective?  The maids?  The writer's?  The housewives?"  Therein lies the film's biggest problem: it wants to be all things to all audiences, and in the process it spins out of control.

With: Aunjanue Ellis, Anna Camp, Ahna O'Reilly, Roslyn Ruff, Chris Lowell, Mike Vogel, Mary Steenburgen. 

"The Help" is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association Of America for thematic material.  The film's running time is two hours and 17 minutes.

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