Tate Taylor’s The Help spends 146 minutes inside Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963, and it wants you to believe a whisper can move a town. The whisper belongs to Aibileen Clark, played by Viola Davis, a maid who has spent her life raising white children and has just buried her only son. She agrees to tell a white college graduate what her days actually look like, and that agreement becomes the engine of the film.
The Help is a period drama, written and directed by Taylor, based on Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel. It carries a tagline that states its thesis outright: “Change begins with a whisper.” That is a soft way to describe a book of interviews that could get its subjects killed, and the gap between the softness and the danger is where this film lives.
Trailer, via TheHelpMovie.
Aibileen Clark and the Son She Lost
Davis plays Aibileen as a woman running out of reasons to stay quiet. She works for Elizabeth Leefolt, a socialite who neglects her two-year-old daughter Mae Mobley, and Aibileen raises the child instead. The source of her grief is plain: she has recently lost her only son, and the loss sits under everything she does.
When Skeeter Phelan asks for help, Aibileen refuses at first. She eventually agrees, but only on terms. She wants measures taken for safety, because the punishments handed out in the South for activity of this kind were real and severe. She also agrees to try to bring others in, starting with her best friend, Minny Jackson.
That caution is the most honest thing in the movie. Aibileen is not brave because she has nothing to lose. She is brave while counting exactly what she stands to lose.
Minny Jackson and the Bathroom in the Storm
Octavia Spencer plays Minny, a maid who has offended employers before and needs work badly. Her family struggles for money, and her mouth keeps costing her jobs. She works for an elderly woman named Mrs. Walters and for Walters’s daughter, Hilly Holbrook, who runs the Jackson chapter of the Junior League.
Hilly is the film’s engine of cruelty, and Bryce Dallas Howard plays her without a flicker of doubt. Hilly pushes to install separate bathrooms for the maids. During a tornado, Minny uses the indoor bathroom, and Hilly fires her for it.
Then Hilly does something worse. She spreads the lie that Minny stole from her, which makes Minny unemployable across Jackson. Minny’s teenaged daughter has to quit school and go to work. A single act of spite, and a child’s education is gone.
Celia Foote and the Rose Bushes
Jessica Chastain plays Celia Foote, a pregnant housewife the society ladies have cut off. She lives in a large house in Madison and needs a maid. She hires Minny and does not tell her husband Johnny, who is Hilly’s former love interest.
Celia suffers a miscarriage. She then reveals she had a shotgun wedding and had miscarried that time as well. Each time she loses a pregnancy, she plants a rose bush in the garden. The film does not underline the image. It does not have to.
Celia also treats the black eye Minny’s abusive husband gave her. Two women with separate wounds, in one house, keeping a secret from a man. Chastain plays Celia as lonely rather than foolish, and the pairing with Spencer gives the film its warmest stretch.
Skeeter Phelan and the Column She Cannot Write
Emma Stone plays Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, unmarried, back home after graduating from Ole Miss, and rejected by Elaine Stein, an editor at Harper and Row in New York. Skeeter takes a local job writing a housekeeping advice column. She knows nothing about housekeeping.
So she asks a friend whether she can get tips from her maid, Aibileen. That small favor turns into something larger. Skeeter overpromises a New York editor a meaningful story told from the perspective of Black female domestic workers in 1960s America, the women everyone in Jackson refers to as “the help.” The title of the film is the title of the book they make.
Skeeter also has a mystery at home. Her mother Charlotte, played by Allison Janney, tells her the family maid Constantine quit. Skeeter does not believe her. Cicely Tyson plays Constantine, the childhood maid whose disappearance Skeeter cannot let go.
The Distance the Film Cannot Close
The Help is built on three stories that intertwine, and the synopsis states its own limit plainly: life in Jackson revolves around the help, and the help is always kept at a certain distance because of racial lines. The film knows this. It says so. Then it spends much of its runtime standing on Skeeter’s side of that distance.
The cast is deep. Anna Camp plays Jolene French, Chris Lowell plays Stuart Whitworth, and twins Eleanor and Emma Henry share the role of Mae Mobley. Sissy Spacek appears among the ensemble. The film has a full bench and uses it.
What it does with that bench is the argument. Aibileen, Minny, and the other maids carry the moral weight. Skeeter carries the plot. She is the one who gets the book deal, the one whose courage is legible to the audience she comes from, and the one the camera follows home.
That is not a fatal flaw. It is the film’s actual subject, whether Taylor means it to be or not.
What the Whispers Cost
The movie sets its pivotal moment in 1963, when the Civil Rights Movement in Jackson was at a fever pitch. The film treats the interviews as an act that ignites others to join. It frames the book as a chain reaction, one woman’s testimony pulling the next.
The Help is sincere about this and it is effective. Davis and Spencer do the heavy work, and they do it without asking for pity. Minny’s rage is funny and then it is not. Aibileen’s grief is quiet and then it is not. When the two of them sit across from Skeeter, the film’s best scenes are simply three people in a room, and the room is enough.
Where the film slips is in its softness. The tagline promises a whisper. The subject is a system that ruined people for less than a whisper. The Help keeps reaching for the version of this story that ends with a book and a lesson, when the source material it draws on describes something closer to a trap.
The Verdict on The Help
The Help runs 146 minutes and earns most of them. It is a drama with a real ensemble, a clear spine, and two performances, from Davis and Spencer, that would carry a weaker film. The writing and direction are Taylor’s, and they are competent rather than daring. He stages the cruelty clearly and the consequences carefully.
The film’s problem is proportion. It gives Skeeter the arc of a person discovering injustice, and gives Aibileen and Minny the arc of people surviving it. Those are not the same story, and the film keeps treating them as one.
Still, the interviews themselves hold up. Aibileen agreeing to talk only if safety measures are taken is a better portrait of courage than any speech the movie could write. Minny losing her daughter’s schooling to Hilly’s lie is a cleaner statement about power than the whole third act.
The Help is worth watching for those two, and for the house in Madison where Celia and Minny quietly keep each other alive. It is a good film that keeps gesturing at a harder one.
KEY FACTS
– Title: The Help
– Year: 2011
– Director and writer: Tate Taylor
– Based on: Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel
– Runtime: 146 minutes
– Genre: Drama
– Tagline: “Change begins with a whisper.”
– Setting: Jackson, Mississippi, 1963
– Rotten Tomatoes: 75%
– Score: 7.5 of 10
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