Review: The Help ****

“No maid in her right mind is ever gonna tell you the truth,” says Viola Davis’s lowly black servant to spunky Skeeter (Emma Stone), a white middle-class wannabe writer, as the latter reveals she wants to lift the lid on life as a coloured domestic in 1960s America.
By Tony Earnshaw
Published 28th Oct 2011, 12:09 BST

An overlong but well-meaning picture that has taken the US by storm, The Help is based on Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller about life on both sides of the racial divide as the US slowly crawled toward integration.

Writer/director Tate Taylor’s adaptation of Stockett’s book casts Skeeter as a well-intentioned naïf who plunges headlong into a scenario that underlines the seismic change that is about to sweep across the country. Her Boswell is Aibileen (Davis), maid to Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard), a purse-lipped racist who obsesses about her domestic secretly using the family bathroom.

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The backdrop is Martin Luther King, the JFK assassination, the murder of Medgar Evers and the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan, though Taylor is careful never to allow any of it to overwhelm the female dynamic of The Help.

There are several performances of note, though perversely Stone, ostensibly the lead, does not fare as well as she might. Davis and Octavia Spencer as Minny, are superb. But the real showstopper is Howard as the quietly controlling separatist.

The Help does not shy from the knowledge that Skeeter puts Aibileen under enormous pressure to collaborate on the book, risking her job – and her life – as the righteous clamour for civil rights gains momentum.