The Help

"You is Kind.
You is Smart.
You is Important."


Anyone who have seen this movie is familiar with those three lines, which is popularly said by Aibileen in the movie called "The Help". The said movie is based on a film with the same title. The movie evolves on the life of black or as they prefer to call the colored maids during the civil rights, early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi.

The story takes off when Skeeter played by Emma Stone graduates from Ole Miss and returns home and takes a job at the local newspaper. Possessing observation skills and humanity that her lifelong friends can’t comprehend, Skeeter desperately wants to tell a story from the perspective of the maids. As expected, the maids are hesitant, but Aibileen played by Viola Davis does relent. The stories begin to flow and soon the robust Minny played by Octavia Spencer joins in.

When Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), the cold ice-queen bee of her social set, proudly announces that her idea to mandate separate bathrooms for the help because “they carry different diseases” has caught the attention of the lieutenant governor, the shot of her self-satisfied smugness cuts to the face of her maid, Aibileen (Viola Davis). Aibileen, inured to the status quo, barely registers the insult as she stands next to Hilly, but it’s in that barely preceptible shadow of hurt and anger that the story of a time and place is told with stunning, infuriating clarity. Skeeter’s reaction is more pronounced, but even her shock is muted, and that she changes the subject rather than challenging Hilly speaks volumes. When she takes the unprecedented step of then privately apologizing to Aibileen, Taylor lets the expressions on each woman’s face in the pregnant silence that follows tell its own paradigm-changing story.

It’s a moment that also gives Skeeter the idea to write a book about life from the point of the view of the help, one that she must finish quickly before, as her New York editor puts it, this whole civil rights thing blows over. It’s an idea that is fraught with the danger of more than just getting fired if Aibileen tells the truth, a fact brought home by the story of Medgar Evans dominating the headlines and television reports that are in the background of the film. Aibileen eventually agrees, despite the implacable resistance of her best friend and mutual support, Minny (Octavia Spencer), Hilly‘s new maid. Minny has no love for her employer, but she adores Hilly’s only occasionally lucid mother (Sissy Spacek). When her patient if grudging toleration of Hilly’s viciousness reaches its limits, it inspires a revenge has a profane poetry of monumental proportions that will inform the rest of the story. 

Spencer all but steals the film from a formidable cast that is the quintessence of ensemble acting. Hers is a face of uncommon beauty powered by a solid performance of such vibrancy that it leaps off the screen even in its many quiet moments of introspection. Imbued with her whole lively heart, it is by turns funny, tragic, compassionate, proud and fearful, and always there is a keen sense of herself as a woman of quality in a world that refuses to recognize it. Davis has the quiet dignity of a broken heart and no options, but it’s Spencer’s Minny who signals the way the times are changing when she, too finally agrees to talk to Skeeter. Stone is the perfect counterpoint. Bright, bubbling, and fierce without being caustic, exploring the new freedoms she is creating for herself and others with a sense of delight and determination. It’s a performance that is as subtle as Skeeter isn’t and all the better for it.

The snobbishness of Jackson’s elite, the hypocrisy it breeds seeing color and class rather than people, and the sublimated unhappiness it causes everyone is a nice metaphor for the proposition that if some are not free, no one can be free, with the inclusion of the “white-trash” element who married up. The loud but sweet Celia (Jessica Chastain) welcomes Minny into her house with open arms, ragged desperation, and a first-class generosity of spirit. Yet her respect for the first maid she’s ever had creates its own uncomfortable, yet revolutionary atmosphere for Minny.

THE HELP has its own revolutionary atmosphere, refusing to divide the world into, pardon the expression, black and white. Without intricacies of the relationships, without the emotional stakes that those intricacies represent, the film would fail monumentally, becoming just another screed about the injustice of the times. Instead, it is a celebration of the heart with an indictment of racism, ageism, sexism, and all the others that is irrefutable.