The Help

3 Stars

"The Help" has Viola Davis going for it, and she is more than enough.

The actress deserves the Academy Award nomination (if not the Oscar Itself) she'll be receiving come early 2012. I'm not working for her; I'm just passing along news of the nearly inevitable.

Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material. You can talk all you want about how a movie begins and ends with the screenwriter(s), or lives and dies on a director's ability to use the camera as more than a recording device. But some film adaptations owe their success primarily to the rightness of the casting. "The Help" is one of them.

Multiple, profitable weeks on the best-seller list aside, the reason "The Help" became a movie has everything to do with who's staring at us, directly, from the film's poster image: Stockett's sympathetic white protagonist, played in the film by Emma Stone. Two of the other three in the poster, Davis and Octavia Spencer (the help), relate to each other, while the third, Bryce Dallas Howard (the despicable queen bee of privilege, early 1960s Jackson, Miss., edition), regards her nails. Like "Glory," the film about the African-American fighting men of the Civil War that was really about Matthew Broderick's character becoming a more liberal humanitarian, "The Help" positions Stone's character -- the budding journalist who undertakes a clandestine book project gathering stories from the African-American housekeepers and child-raisers of Jackson -- front and center. If this sounds like trouble, there is good news: The writer-director of the film, Tate Taylor, has wisely adjusted the book's focus so that instead of three narrators taking turns, Davis' character, Aibileen Clark, becomes the story's quietly dominant voice.

In the poster for "The Help," this inspired actress's guarded, wary body language and neutral mask speak volumes about a place, a time, a world ripe for social adjustment. There's more acting going on in the poster than in many an entire feature.

Stone plays Miss Skeeter, who is clearly too good for Jackson and its snippy racists. She lucks into a job on the Jackson Journal as an advice columnist writing under the handle "Miss Myrna," dealing with matters of domestic engineering. Skeeter elicits advice and counsel from Aibileen, who has raised 17 white children for lousy pay and immeasurable grief from a variety of employers who like Mississippi the way it is, thank you very much. Then, responding to the civil rights scent in the air, Skeeter persuades Aibileen and her best friend and fellow domestic, Minny, played by Spencer, to reveal something of their life stories under pseudonyms. Once published, Skeeter's book scandalizes the curdled cream of Jackson society, embodied by Howard's character, Hilly.

If only Jessica Chastain, wonderful as a sweet-natured bombshell who employs Minny on the sly, had also played Hilly! As written and as acted, heavily, by Howard, the story's key antagonist lacks the sort of specificity and detail that allows a caricature to become a character, however loathsome. Even so, "The Help" flits pleasingly from storyline to storyline. Just when you begin to grow itchy with Skeeter's travails, the script refocuses on Aibileen and the film transcends its well-intentioned limitations. Davis creates a whole character we care about, and feel we know, and she does so often by revealing as little as possible in tense situations with Aibileen's employers. Do we believe every particular about Aibileen and Skeeter becoming sisters under the skin? Perhaps not. But we believe Davis every second, and it has been a few months, at least, since good and great actresses have had the opportunity to relax into scenes given some breathing room.

The movie is a very pretty and somewhat generic thing visually, and it doesn't benefit from composer Thomas Newman's musical syrup. Those who are coming to "The Help" wanting a faithful but not slavish film adaptation won't care much about those issues. At an awards show a couple of years ago, Meryl Streep said from the stage: "My God, somebody give her a movie!" The "her" was Davis, Streep's fellow "Doubt" Oscar nominee. Consider "The Help," featuring crafty supporting turns from Sissy Spacek and Allison Janney, a well-crafted down payment on the movie Davis so clearly has in her.

 

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"The Help" Movie Trailer

 

"The Help" Movie Review

 

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for thematic material).

Running time: 2:17.

Cast: Emma Stone (Skeeter); Viola Davis (Aibileen); Bryce Dallas Howard (Hilly); Octavia Spencer (Minny); Jessica Chastain (Celia); Allison Janney (Charlotte); Sissy Spacek (Missus Walters); Chris Lowell (Stuart).

Credits: Written and directed by Tate Taylor; based on the novel by Kathryn Stockett; produced by Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan. A DreamWorks Pictures release.

 

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