Tate Taylor (2011)

There was a lot of dialogue I couldn’t make out.  I struggled to get a hang of the timeframe (though Sally assures me it isn’t complicated).  The focus on a single character as the embodiment of local racism tends to suggest there isn’t much of a social and moral evil to be eradicated in the first place.  But The Help, which Tate Taylor adapted from Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling debut novel of 2009, is full of good things – one of the best is that what you’d expect to be pushed hard isn’t.    Taylor (who’s white and, according to Wikipedia, a childhood friend of Stockett) gives the characters time to get a purchase in the audience’s mind.  For a while, The Help seems to lack a focal point:  Skeeter Phelan, the college graduate and aspiring writer (presumably based on Stockett, whose novel was partly autobiographical) is the central consciousness only in a limited way and it wouldn’t make emotional sense, given the story’s themes, for her to dominate.  This is just as well:  although Emma Stone, who plays Skeeter, is proficient and likeable, she doesn’t give out a lot, especially in the girl’s quieter, more reflective moments.   The Help’s heroines are Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson, the black maids – aka ‘the help’ – who look after the children of white families in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s and whose experiences are the subject of the book Skeeter is trying to write.

The characters of Aibileen and Minny complement each other obviously but satisfyingly   and the quality of Viola Davis’s portrait of Aibileen gives depth to the relationship, and the whole film:  it’s Aibileen who gradually emerges as the spirit of the story.   Viola Davis is superb:  you see Aibileen’s sweat and her love for the child in her care – you seem to see her whole life in her slightly laboured, weary walk.  Davis gives us a persistently strong sense of how Aibileen needs to keep things inside to keep going.  She doesn’t strain for dignity but her Aibileen is dignified, even noble. In the more openly audience-pleasing role of Minny, Octavia Spencer gives a relatively simple performance but it’s very enjoyable and highly effective.  Because Spencer’s round face and body and big eyes evoke the mammies in movies of a different era, the distance between the cartoon black maids in those old films and the opportunity given to Spencer here has a real impact.  The racist Hilly Holbrook is the crude stereotype in this script:  Bryce Dallas Howard does as well as anyone could with the role – she gives occasional hints of vulnerability, even if they don’t get in the way of loathing Hilly.  As Minny’s painfully guileless employer Celia Foote, Jessica Chastain is dazzling.  What was hidden in The Tree of Life, where Chastain was asked to animate a Pre-Raphaelite image, is in bloom here.  This is a rich characterisation – Celia is vividly pretty and tarty, ridiculous and fragile.  The scene in which she suffers her latest miscarriage is one of the most touching things I’ve seen in a new film this year.

The cast includes an amazing collection of older actresses – Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen, Cicely Tyson.  The last named is a powerful presence not just because of the associations of her screen roles in the 1970s (Sounder, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) but also because she’s been seen so rarely over the decades since.  Mary Steenburgen, incredibly beautiful, is witty in the small role of the New York editor who tells Skeeter that, if she can collect the stories of a dozen more black maids, she may have a publishable book.  Sissy Spacek is thoroughly and engagingly eccentric as Hilly’s mother.  As Skeeter’s, Allison Janney at first looks to have been cast in a more serious-minded reprise of the hysterical matriarch she played in Hairspray but Janney creates layers to a character when a script doesn’t supply them; as a result, Mrs Phelan’s transformation here is convincing.  In the scene in which this anxiously conventional woman is put on the spot – she has to choose to be loyal either to her black help or to the hatchet-faced white sorority who’ve come for lunch and are about to honour Mrs Phelan – Janney is piercingly helpless.  The men don’t count for a lot, although Mike Vogel does well as Celia’s husband Johnny:  Tate Taylor keeps making us expect him to turn abusive and it’s effective when he’s revealed as kindly and protective, towards Minny as well as Celia.    But the relationship between Skeeter and her senator’s son boyfriend Stewart (Chris Lowell) is unconvincing:  you just don’t believe Stewart wouldn’t have had any sense of her dangerous liberal credentials before her book is published and he breaks off from her.

The Help‘s potent themes are realised cleverly.  Although making the vile, snooty Hilly the only racist in town undermines the premise of the story, her repeated humiliations work at an emotional level:  when Hilly does things that makes the other characters’ and the audience’s blood boil, playing practical jokes on her is a good way of people getting their own back and giving us a helping of schadenfreude.  Thanks to his focus on Hilly, Taylor actually manages to remind us that the racial prejudice described here isn’t a thing of the past.  (Hilly’s eating a chocolate pie the ingredients of which include Minny’s excrement obviously doesn’t do away with the attitudes Hilly represents.)  The references to systemic racism are relatively few but well handled – especially when Aibileen has to get home alone in the dark, on a night when the Ku Klux Klan are threatening a lynching.  As they get off a bus, Aibileen calmly reassures an elderly black man (Nelsan Ellis) that she’ll be fine returning on her own but panic quickly sets in and, as she hurries towards home and safety, she slips and falls heavily.  It’s a really upsetting sequence.  The Help runs 146 minutes but time passes very quickly.  Although Tate Taylor’s storytelling leaves something to be desired, he draws out some of the sub-themes well – for example, the ways in which the white women can be shunned or endangered too, whether as a result of a personal grudge (Celia’s husband was once Hilly’s boyfriend) or local legislation.  Thomas Newman’s score – those chords are unmistakable – is nicely underused.

30 October 2011