The Help

Boldly displaying the ugly dimensions permeating a culture whose social fabric is thoroughly racist, Tate Taylor's The Help situates us in Jackson, Mississippi, and demonstrates how difficult it was for African Americans to either express their points of view or hope for a better life within.

Not to say that it's any easier now, Taylor just situates her narrative in the past in order to mitigate the shock of investigating current pervasive racist realities, thereby making her message easier to digest while enabling it to reach a broader audience.

This strategy works effectively for the aforementioned reason but it also ignores the fact that there are still systematic racist discourses influencing sundry public and private spheres whose destabilizing affects are as vicious as they are subtle. It's not a matter of thinking that things were like that 50 years ago and they're fine in the present, it's a matter of reexamining the present in order to discover the ways in which racist attitudes continue to disable so that 50 years from now our cultures will be all the more inclusive, and so on.

The film presents an aspiring writer, 'Skeeter' Phelan (Emma Stone), who finds the ways in which her African American compatriots are treated revolting, seeing how their wages are low, there is no possibility for advancement, they are treated like slaves, and have basically no means by which to defend themselves. She seeks to disseminate their voices in the form of a book which collects and transmits their stories. This is no easy task due to the legal ramifications of challenging Mississippi's segregated society, so said stories must be collected clandestinely, pseudonyms must be employed, specific geographic locations cannot be identified, and during the collection process appearances must be kept up as usual.

Two maids, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), agree to share their stories at great personal risk and as the Civil Rights Movement intensifies many of their friends sign-up as well. The book is released, it has an impact, there's a happy ending.

I found one aspect of the ending troubling, however, in regards to the ways in which Minny is offered full-time employment with the Footes (Jessica Chastain as Celia and Mike Vogel as Johnny). Internally, the ending works insofar as Minny's career had been threatened by a rumour spread by her former employer and she now no longer has to worry about putting food on the table. But she's offered full-time employment within the same set of circumstances within which she was previously employed, albeit with a much more enlightened couple. Obviously one book isn't going to magically uproot and transform decades of oppressive practices and suggesting that this had happened would have made The Help seem somewhat flippant. But if the Footes had made a stronger commitment to trying to redefine things so that Minny didn't have to work as a maid for the rest of her life, thereby suggesting that they were trying to open up a broader commercial space for her within which her talents could flourish, The Help would have packed a stronger progressive punch into its already sturdy, innovative, repertoire.

The stifling nature of being any married woman in a culture defined by strict patriarchal gender roles is intelligently illustrated as well.