Breadth Both Bolsters and Burdens 'The Help'

As the screen settles on a sunlit Southern kitchen, the interviewer asks her question: “What does it feel like to raise a white child, when your own child’s at home being looked after by somebody else?” The maid, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), begins, “it feels...”, but her expression becomes clouded and she trails off. It’s the sort of uncomfortable moment emblematic of the “The Help.” Though the film—based on the book by Kathryn Stockett—takes for its subject the stories of the lives of maids working in Jackson, Miss. in the 1960s, it is not a means of scrupulously documenting the difficulties of their lives. Rather, the film tells a story about how these difficulties affect the lives of the maids and their relationships.

The storyline is not that revolutionary: a young college student, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone), returns home to the South with sky-high journalistic aspirations, gets a job at the local paper, and then slowly grows conscious of some of the difficulties of the African-American maids, in particular those who work for her friends. She begins a book telling the stories of these maids, predictably causing outrage in the community.

“The Help” offers a breadth-oriented rather than a depth-oriented approach to this narrative. There are a lot of maids, and a large assortment of other characters as well, and most of them are extremely well acted and painted with realism and clarity. The exceptions to this are the budding journalist Skeeter, and the film’s villain, Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard). Hilly is racist, pouty, and popular, and wears cute dresses, and that’s about all there is to her. Skeeter is, of course, a “strong and independent” woman with fierce opinions and educated ideals. Though she is in some ways the protagonist of the film, her role is arguably more functional than substantive, existing to connect and coordinate the movie’s portrayal of some far more interesting characters, such as the maids and her mother. In this way, her character becomes problematic—she is given just enough detail to get in the way of the other, more interesting stories, without being nearly as engaging. To the film’s credit, Skeeter is portrayed realistically; she’s not quite a saint because she’s writing the book partly to impress her editors in New York, though she’s certainly passionate about her cause. But her realism doesn’t quite endow her with depth.

For all its flaws, though, “The Help” is at heart a movie that relies on its characters, and as such showcases some well filled roles. The most important of these is Aibileen, the maid whom Skeeter first interviews, and the film’s narrator. Viola Davis’s character provides a great counterpoint to Skeeter; she is a strong woman in and of herself, not solely because she says what she’s thinking and has great aspirations. Other standout performances include Skeeter’s mother, played by Allison Janney, and Aibileen’s friend Minny, portrayed by Octavia Spencer. These actors’ gifts allow them to flesh out vivid characters even in a crowd of colorful roles. Indeed, aforementioned exceptions aside, almost all of the acting is superb in “The Help,” and the film’s performers succeed in bringing out the tapestry of lives that the story seeks to weave.

And it is a beautiful sort of portrait, though it’s not altogether satisfying. The movie takes an interesting artistic angle by portraying the deep South unconventionally—that is, instead of presenting the sort of exhaustive, troubling inwardness of the Southern gothic conceit, it shows us the paroxysm of an entire community, an entire demographic.  But the trouble with this bird’s-eye approach is that although the maid characters like Aibileen and Minny are wonderfully done, they just don’t have enough presence in the film. To be fair, the point of “The Help” isn’t to delve exhaustively into any one particular character’s storyline—but by casting so wide a narrative net, the film skates a little bit too lightly over the issues it tries to portray. We never see the brutality of Aibileen’s story, we only hear her recount it, and though her face reveals to us some of the pain that she has endured, such passing acknowledgement seems inadequate in the face of some of the fluffier parts of the film. A bunch of white women gossiping about Skeeter’s chances of nabbing a husband just aren’t a satisfying replacement for a serious account of the story’s slighted suffering. For this reason, “The Help” proves both an entertaining yet unsettlingly uneven affair.

—Staff writer Aisha K. Down can be reached at aishadown@college.harvard.edu.