The Help

dir: Tate Taylor

Yeah, yeah. I know. It can’t be good, can it?

It’s so obvious in its pandering for Oscars. It’s so worthy. It reeks of Oprah, and it’s all so, so goddamn earnest.

What if I told you that it’s actually not that a bad film? I think you’d be unpleasantly surprised. And even if the spirit of Hattie McDaniel hovers over the movie, cursing and moaning in contempt, it’s not entirely without merit.

Naturally, I’m not the intended audience, though I’m the right ‘colour’. White, American middle-aged, middle-class women are clearly the key demographic that made this flick such a success. It has dominated the US box office for the last few weeks like it’s one of the Transformers movies. Of course, some of the characters are less animated than the robots, but other than that there is little they share in common.

Apart from being big, stonking successes, that is. Of course, one is slightly less annoying and self-righteous than the other. And the other doesn’t have robots.

It’s set in the early 60s, in Mississippi. Guess what and who it’s about. Go on, I dare you, I double dare you, I triple dare you.

Yes, it’s about the Poles who fled the Nazis and the Soviets, and who emigrated to the States, and how they were oppressed and persecuted by people who sought to make them the butt of every lazy joke.

Okay, it’s really about the last days of Jim Crow, and the fact that African-Americans, especially the women who worked as maids in the houses of the white and wealthy, were still pretty much indentured servants, even though it was more than 70 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Wait, I’m going to backtrack, none of this is right: What it’s really about is how the less-than-compassionate way white women treated their staff in Jackson, Mississippi made a particular white woman feel. It made her feel bad. Real bad. She didn’t like it. And so she wanted to share her feelings of not liking it with the world. And lo, she wrote a book, compiling the stories of a number of maids, to give them voice.

Isn’t she wonderful? And her name’s Skeeter! Even better, that’s her nickname. Her real name is Eugenia, and, though annoying some of the time, she is well played by Emma Stone, who is virtually in every flick coming out that needs a nice white girl in it.

And this flick really needed a nice white girl, because most of the other ones are vile bitches.

Skeeter is, like many of the white women who surround her, the product of her upbringing and background. But the curious thing about that is she, like all the women like her, was brought up by a black nanny. A black nanny who loved her, adored her, and did all the things a mother’s meant to do.

The fate of all these nannies and maids is to bring up the children of white women who loathe them, but need them as status symbols, only, in turn, to be reviled by the same children once they grow up.

At least, that’s the simple theme as delivered to us. Our main character is prompted to record the stories of these humble women, because she is so upset at the treatment of her own nanny, who’s been summarily fired.

And when she sees her own friends treating the serfs like peasants, it affronts her. She is affronted. And in the context of the rising tensions to do with the civil rights movement, and the killing of various people for speaking out and up, Skeeter’s actions, and the maids courage to speak out, is seen as a dangerous act. An act that could have serious repercussions.

Not for Skeeter, of course. The only danger is faced by the maids, who are petrified, and who dread never being employed again in the town of Jackson. The only thing Skeeter is in danger of is breaking a nail, or having her hair frizz out.

This is a woman’s story, of women, for women, about women. It’s mostly about what bitches women can be to other women. The head awful woman, Hillie (Bryce Dallas Howard), hates black people so much she won’t even let her maid Minny (Octavia Spencer) use the inside toilet. She insists that Minny go outside, during a hurricane.

Minny don’t play that shit. And she gets fired. And she wants revenge. REVENGE!

Beyond that, Hillie is so wicked that she wants legislation passed that makes it mandatory for all maids to crap and piss outside like the animals that they are. The reason is that these women, who are human enough to be allowed to bring up the kids the mothers are too fucking lazy to bring up, are still so sub-human that their bathroom activities present a danger to white humanity.

Were you expecting subtlety in these portrayals of race relations and conflict between women of different social strata? This film doesn’t know the meaning of the word. Never come across it in any dictionary that this section of Hollywood has access to.

Viola Davis plays another maid, all of whom seem to be at the mercy of Hillie and her machinations, and who’s tired, but grateful with her lot in life. But societal forces are tearing her in each and every direction. If Viola Davis doesn’t score an Oscar nomination for her unglamorous role here, I’ll eat a Stetson. Her scene towards the end of the film, where she says goodbye to a child, was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve seen in a long while.

Her competition for the Best Supporting Actress will be Octavia Spencer, who steals virtually every scene she’s in. A single act of Minny’s (perhaps understandable but definitely criminal), dominates the rest of the flick in an absurd way. I don’t know who’s more likely to get it, because these things are impossible to qualify, but she’s got my vote.

She gets to have her own timid story helping another white woman (the luminous Jessica Chastain, who unfortunately looks like she’s playing Marilyn Monroe here) achieve the pinnacle of womanhood by making her a better housewife. Their scenes together are phenomenal, though, making up for the murky gender politics they represent.

I can acknowledge that giving voice to these women was a good thing. I just don’t think the film adequately makes the case that the book’s publication contributed or meant anything in the context of the civil rights movement. And it doesn’t even really pretend that things changed for the better for the maids of Jackson, Mississippi. It added nothing to our understanding of the time, or the characters, or any meaningful development of anything. All it really asserts is that they got revenge on Hillie, and then some, in a completely juvenile and horrible way that completely undercuts the message of the flick. It was just childish pandering to the audience.

And what’s the message? That racism was bad. That the lives of black people in the South were still constrained and difficult because of institutionalised racism, and because of the rampant personal racism still embodied by these wealthy white women.

And that everything instantly became better because a white woman got a book published saying what awful masters these white women were to their servants.

Still, it wasn’t without merit. Enjoyable performances (including from the always dependable Allison Janney as Skeeter’s mother, who gets the same kind of scene with Hillie that Janney had in Juno, so I guess she’s good at it) made up for the schizophrenic editing and confusing screen time given to meaningless chick flick kind of stuff like dresses, hairstyles and pining over awful boys that belies the alleged ‘weightiness’ of the subject matter. The treatment of men in this flick is problematic as well, but it’s not like the weeping biddies in the audience give a damn.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you this year’s Blind Side/Precious, only slightly less awful.

6 times this flick hurt me in my ovaries out of 10

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“Fried chicken just tend to make you feel better about life” – Jesus fucking Christ, next you’ll be telling us about the healing powers of watermelon – The Help.