Dir:- Tate Taylor
Starr:- Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Allison Janney
Scr:- Tate Taylor adapted from a novel by Kathryn Stockett
DOP:- Stephen Goldblatt
Producer(s):- Michael Barnathan, Chris Columbus, Brunson Green
At a certain point in Tate Taylor’s Oscar-friendly adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel about white Southern society women and their black maids I found myself asking where’s the violence, where’s the civil rights movement, where are the lynchings? The peculiar thing here wasn’t this film’s softly, softly approach to racial politics in the 1960’s, but rather my own righteous preconceptions toward how those racial politics must have manifested themselves. Films such as Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi and Malcolm X, as well as movies dealing with the earlier 1930’s period of Jim Crow segregation, such as The Great Debaters and The Colour Purple, tend to paint a far more explicitly negative image of black-white race relations in the ‘Deep South’. It is this kind of acquired knowledge that many viewers will bring to their viewing of The Help, which may well cloud judgement about the drama’s relative merits, based on the dubious notion that it fails to represent adequately the true tenor of the times.
Stockett and Taylor do not make life easy for themselves as the location for much of the action of the film is Jackson, Mississippi, which was perhaps the pre-eminent site of the fledgling civil rights protests of Medgar Evers and James Meredith, to name just two notable figureheads of the civil rights movement. In a city like Jackson in the 1960’s it seems incomprehensible that a film would attempt to portray a near-bloodless racial disharmony between whites and blacks. However, that is ignoring the fact that Stockett’s work is set specifically within an upper-class, white, suburban enclave of Jackson, with little screen time spent outside of the homes of wealthy white families. It also neglects the fact that not only is the physical setting of the movie rather narrow and specific, but also the relationships which the movie focuses on are predominately female, with male presences (both white or black) being either wholly absent, or pushed to the extreme peripheries of the film. What Stockett and Taylor are most concerned with is the domestic spaces that are populated by women, with pretty much the only work that gets acknowledged in the film, being the work of the black maids within these domestic spaces (unless you include Emma Stone’s journalism).
Racial politics are certainly at the forefront of the movies concerns, but it is racial politics as filtered through the limited consciences of lowly black maids and their frivolous white society women employees. Focusing upon this tightly framed and realised universe, Stockett and Taylor manage to wreak havoc with cliché, treading exceptionally treacherous ground between Driving Miss Daisy ignorance and a deliberate circumvention of the, now, equally banal litany of violent episodes that populate any ‘hard-hitting’ account of good ‘ol boy, down south living. Such cliché-puncturing isn’t restricted to the way in which black-white relationships are portrayed in the movie, but also comes into action in scenes like the one involving Jessica Chastain’s Celia Foote locking herself in the bathroom, whereby Taylor clearly toys with an audience’s willingness to read the worst possible scenario.
Here's what I didn't prepare earlier. Jessica Chastain as Celia Foote, the most gossiped about woman in Jackson.
There are undercurrents of violence running throughout the film. The brief entrances that the male figures make, when not occurring within the domestic sphere, tend toward the potential for physical abuse. Even the mild-mannered Johnny Foote (Mike Vogel), when he finally makes an entrance into the film, does so by nearly scaring Minny Jackson (an uproariously smart-mouthed Octavia Spencer) half to death. The most fascinating facet of this film is the way in which these potential sources of violence and racial hatred are somehow suppressed, or stifled, by the blanding necessity for suburban harmonisation.
It is the intense, almost entirely unspoken, conformity that this Jackson suburb demands that forges the movie’s one essential cross-racial relationship of ‘equals’. Emma Stone’s Skeeter Phelan is a forthright and slightly tom-boyish young woman, who has ambitions way beyond those expected of her as the offspring of a society woman like her mother Charlotte (a nicely attenuated turn from the always reliable Allison Janney). More than anything Skeeter wants to be a journalist, but at the start of the movie she is patronisingly employed as cover for a domestic advice column; as being a woman she should have no bother communicating the do’s and don’t’s of being the perfect housewife. Being at a complete loss as to what to write about Skeeter decides to ask Aibileen (Viola Davis), the maid of a friend Elizabeth (Ahna O’Reilly), for help. It is through this initial approach for a different kind of ‘help’ to that which Aibileen is normally paid her pittance wage, that the film begins to examine the curious circumstances that has led to generations of complacently racist white women being raised, in effect, by black maids and nannies.
Viola Davis, an actress that has paid her dues in small, almost cameo, roles over the course of the last two decades, finally gets a character of some substance in which she can show the full range of her acting talents. Prior to The Help, Davis’s most notable cinematic roles were probably as the paranoid Dr. Gordon in Soderbergh’s reimagining of Solaris and as the bereaved Mrs. Miller (a small but hugely impressive performance) in the excellent adaptation of Doubt. As Aibileen, Davis is very much the conscience of the film and it is her voiceover that the audience follows throughout. Her seemingly stolid, professional exterior, masks an inner-world that is touched by the tragedy of her son’s death and the continuing pain that comes from the emotional bond she establishes with every one of her white charges. Skeeter offers up the flipside of this experience, by demonstrating, without any of the unthinking prejudice of the likes of Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard in uber-bitch mode), how dependent and emotionally attached to her own nanny Callie (Millicent Bolton) she is, to the extent that Callie’s sacking creates a massive rift between Skeeter and her mother.
What the movie develops quite meticulously is a sense of an old order and traditional pattern of behaviour, that is gradually being challenged by outlying figures, such as Celia Foote, and the stubbornness of outsider-insiders, such as Skeeter. The unacceptable ways in which the Jackson suburb are shown to passive-aggressively enforce an absurd segregation between the races, has its more obviously racist outpouring in the inspired hatred of Hilly Holbrook. Bryce Dallas Howard is almost unrecognisable in this role and it is Hilly’s overt prejudice that highlights most acutely the injustices of a society that will allow a black woman to pour emotional and physical love and affection all over a white child, but will not allow them to share the same toilet for fear of contamination. However, what is perhaps most frightening about the cosseted society that Taylor’s film depicts, is the idea that without Hilly’s almost pantomime bile and hatred, the overt racism of these Jackson suburbs would go almost unnoticed.
The red-haired racist, her alcoholic mother and the inventor of obscene pie justice.
The Help is by no means the best analysis of America’s racial prejudices, for that it is still worthwhile looking up Spike Lee’s classic Do the Right Thing, but then I’m not entirely convinced that this is the main aim of the film’s makers. There is an undeniable awkwardness in the high comic tones of certain performances (Chastain and Spencer, in particular) and the dramatic gravitas of Davis’s central turn. Yet so many of the actors in this film deliver excellent work that it is difficult to quibble too heavily with this slight unevenness of tone. It is especially nice to see veterans such as Mary Steenburgen and Sissy Spacek getting delightful little cameo parts in which they can flex a little of their comic abilities. Spacek is excellent in the notorious pie sequence, whilst Steenburgen gets to camp it up nicely as a New York publisher always in the company of more than one man. The manner in which the black areas of Jackson are depicted is probably where the film leaves most to be desired and there are flawed scenes, like the flashback in which Callie is fired, but overall this is a solid, Awards-friendly drama, that will almost certainly give at least one Oscar win come February.
Pros
- Exceptionally strong acting from a relatively unfamiliar cast.
- Some nicely realised period detail.
- An intriguing focus on female relationships and the politics of domestic space.
Cons
- An at times rather too awkward melding of comedy and drama.
- The dubiously underplayed historical elements may be unsatisfactory for some.
- Some sequences are simply too dull and pointless and could have easily been cut.
Rating:- 6/10
Apercu: Cinephilia 