An Imperfect Tale of Moral Uplift

An Imperfect Tale of Moral Uplift

L. Quart: The Help

HOLLYWOOD HAS always produced films that depict the civil rights era in a manner that allows Northern white audiences to feel comfortable and unquestioning of their racial attitudes. A striking example was Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning—a work that deals with the 1964 disappearance of three civil rights activists during Mississippi’s “Freedom Summer.” Parker, a sincere, socially conscious director, decided that the only way he could make a viable commercial film about the black civil rights struggle was to invert reality and feature not only whites but the FBI as heroes, despite the fact that the FBI’s role in the South was essentially antagonistic to the movement (they often spied on activists rather than protect them), and turn blacks into docile victims. In its desire to appeal to a mainstream audience, Mississippi Burning used a great many skillfully edited action sequences and, more importantly, dropped out crucial social details, like the fact that the civil rights protests in the South were rooted in the courage and organizing skills of blacks. It also evaded the reality that racism was not solely the monopoly of Southern rednecks.

The Help, based on the big 2009 bestseller by Kathryn Stockett, isn’t as flagrant a revision of history as Mississippi Burning, but it still sanitizes and simplifies the nature of black-white relations. (It also sweetens the poverty of the black section of town, making it look like a carefully calibrated set rather than a real neighborhood.) Set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963, The Help centers on Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), an upper-middle class white woman with aspirations to be a journalist and novelist. She returns from college, with liberal views, to her shrill mother, Charlotte (Allison Janney), who nags her about getting married, and female friends who never question their racist attitudes or their belief that marriage and motherhood are women’s prime destiny.

These financially comfortable white women—leaders of local society—have been raised by black nannies, and nannies are raising their children as well. However, the nannies’ white employers treat them with disdain, as if they barely exist. The film’s narrative focuses on the outsider Skeeter taking what was a big risk in a totally segregated society: to interview one of the maids, Aibileen (played by a luminous Viola Davis), for a dangerously revelatory book about how the maids live their lives.

Some black critics have complained that the film offers the age-old Hollywood image of the “white savior” who, like the white civil rights activists in Mississippi Burning, helps a group of beleaguered blacks that are unable to help themselves. However, though its Skeeter who writes the book and whose perspective supposedly dominates the film, the only characters that The Help gives any depth are Aibileen (whose voiceover narration opens and closes the film) and her more stereotypical and noisy best friend, Minny (Octavia Spencer), who is too tough and spirited for her employers to beat down. Skeeter, beyond being attractive, smart, and independent, is a bland character, who exists more to serve the film’s theme than to function as a three-dimensional figure. Her failed romantic relationship is left undeveloped and seems to have been inserted just to make sure we know that she likes men.

As a result, much of the film’s poignancy and power derive from the quietly observant integrity, warmth, and dignity of Aibileen, who has raised seventeen white children in Jackson during a time when she lost her own son. Aibileen and the other black maids are surrogate mothers for the white children—a thankless, badly paid, insecure job.

The film compensates for them having to live in a hellish environment by making them wiser, more caring, and better mothers than any of the white women they work for. Skeeter herself was more attached to her beloved nanny, Constantine (Cicely Tyson)—a fount of commonsense wisdom—than to her mother. I’m certain some of these maids were as noble as the film makes them out to be—there have been enough memoirs by Southern white writers to reinforce that notion. But turning social victims into noble heroines is also a way of muting white guilt. Given the exploitative, racist milieu they inhabit, it’s surprising that none of the maids carry their resentment about their station in life over to their child-rearing.

The film’s white women characters, who belong to bridge clubs and run benefits, are superficially rendered (except for Skeeter), even holding a fundraiser for starving children in Africa, completely unconscious of the irony involved. The queen bee of this caricatured group, Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard), is an overt racist who thinks that by forcing Minny to use a bathroom out back, she’s preserving the Southern way of life. Hilly is so vile and vicious that she’s even hated by her own dotty, alcoholic mother. Hilly does get her comeuppance, but undergoes no magical transformation.

Though The Help never allows itself to get too grave, Tate Taylor, whose direction is devoid of subtlety, still felt he needed to lighten the film by putting in comic bits. An episode about an offensive pie that Minny baked is milked for all its worth. And there is the over-the-top, childless, flirty trailer-trash Celia (Jessica Chastain), married to a rich man, who hires Minny after she is blacklisted. Celia is a comic and pathetic character, who demonstrates Minny’s competence and superiority of character to the white women she serves.

The Help is a crowd-pleasing, feel-good film that allows white audiences to feel superior to the racist, complacent white women of Jackson, and stirs both black and white audiences to applaud the nobility of the black maids. It’s also a story of female empowerment that sees Minny finally leave her brutalizing husband, Aibileen impart self-esteem to a female toddler she takes care of, and Skeeter’s mother finally respect and become supportive of her daughter’s aspirations. The film eschews realism in its settings and its characters. But in a summer of the usual special effects–ridden blockbusters and forgettable romantic comedies, it’s good to see a Hollywood film deal with a significant subject, however adulterated.

Leonard Quart is the coauthor of the fourth edition of American Film and Society Since 1945 and is a contributing editor of Cineaste.