Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer make The Help moving enough to merit an evening. Tate Taylor’s drama is less convincing about segregation, giving its white heroine too much credit and its audience too much comfort.
The Help works well enough as a sentimental ensemble drama to make its evasions frustrating. Tate Taylor, adapting Kathryn Stockett’s novel, wants a broad audience to listen to black domestic workers describing their lives in 1960s Mississippi. He gets that audience through humour, friendship and actors who can hold a scene without raising their voices. But his account of segregation is so anxious to offer comfort that the cruelty begins to seem easier to put right than it should.
Emma Stone plays Skeeter Phelan, the white woman who helps turn the maids’ experiences into a book. Stone makes her interest in their stories easy to believe, and the growing trust between Skeeter and Viola Davis’s Aibileen Clark gives the film something more substantial than speeches about decency. Yet Taylor presents Skeeter so approvingly that there is little room to question her position. We spend too much time being assured of her goodness when the women talking to her have more to tell us.
Davis is the reason that imbalance does not sink the film. When Aibileen recounts her experience, the quietness of Davis’s delivery makes us attend to how much she chooses to say and how difficult saying it is. We were moved by those passages because she makes the act of trusting a listener feel risky. Taylor gives her room to do this, and for a while the film stops trying quite so hard to assure us that decent people will make everything better.
Octavia Spencer gives Minny Jackson the comic force the film needs, with timing sharp enough to prevent the humour from becoming merely cosy. Her presence makes the changes between comedy and hurt feel less laboured. Jessica Chastain brings welcome vulnerability to Celia Foote, finding some private feeling in another broadly written part. Bryce Dallas Howard has less room as Hilly Holbrook, whose emphatic characterisation is too easy to read; Taylor leaves us little to discover about her.
Stephen Goldblatt’s glossy photography favours close-ups, a sensible choice when Davis can hold the attention with so little apparent effort. The polished finish is less helpful to a film already inclined to soften its setting. Mark Ricker’s production design supplies the period detail efficiently, but its neatness adds to the sense that this is a past made comfortable to visit. The actors are often more successful at making us uneasy than anything that surrounds them.
At 146 minutes, it also gives its incidental stories more space than they earn. Hughes Winborne’s editing keeps individual exchanges clear, but the accumulation of subplots weakens the urgency of the women’s undertaking. Thomas Newman’s score reinforces the invitation to feel for them, sometimes too insistently; Davis has usually got us there before the music needs to intervene. A firmer cut and less musical encouragement would have trusted the cast more.
The film follows a familiar course for a popular historical drama, using friendships to make a large injustice easier to understand. That can work, and the warmth between the women explains much of its appeal. Here, however, Taylor seems too satisfied with the discovery that individuals can be kind, and too ready to let that kindness reassure us about everything else. See it for Davis and Spencer, with the caveat that its comforting account of history needs more questioning than the film supplies.
