4 stars (out of 5)
Director: Tate Taylor
Cast: Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sissy Spacek, Allison Janney
Rating: (M)
They answer doors, cook and serve meals, and raise children for parents who are, supposedly, too busy to bother. They do all this with an air of invisibility, ignored except when they're being snapped at.
And through it all, "The Help" have to maintain a silent stoicism, even when their white employers in 1960s Mississippi mutter about "the coloured situation".
The Help is that rare civil-rights melodrama to tell its story from the point of view of faceless, almost anonymous black Southerners who lived through that era. It's based on a best-selling novel about a new college graduate determined to make a name for herself by writing a book told from the maids' point of view.
Emma Stone (Easy A) is plucky, self-possessed Skeeter, fresh out of Ole Miss and ready to take a job - any job - to get the experience she'll need to work in New York.
Skeeter turns her household cleaning column into an excuse to chat with her friends' maids. That's where she figures out a pitch to make to a New York publisher (Mary Steenburgen). She'll get the maids to tell their story.
Director Tate Taylor steps back from the precipice of precious to focus on the maids. Merely talking to Skeeter about their lives was illegal under the "Jim Crow" racial subjugation laws of Mississippi. But the long-suffering Aibileen (Viola Davis, wonderful) and too-sassy-to-suffer-forever Minny (Octavia Spencer, in a break-out performance) start to talk. And talk. And through them, we see Jackson's social register laid bare.
- ROGER MOORE
The Orlando Sentinel
