  Directed by Tate TaylorStarring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, Ahna O’Reilly, Chris Lowell, and Mary Steenburgen
Released Aug. 11, 2011 |
If The Help doesn’t get heavy Oscar consideration in a number of major categories, I’d be shocked. But this is not a case of a film so valuable that its impact on the Academy is a given barely midway through the year. Rather, the film is so pandering to white revisionist activism that it essentially challenges the liberal elders of the Academy to not exalt it, if for no other reason than to note their own progressive attitudes toward social mores, however outdated and maligned.
Like so many films before it (Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi being the most famous examples), The Help is one of those retroactive problem films that thanks one-dimensional Caucasian players for their selfless work in chipping away at segregation in the American South. What sets The Help apart, I suppose, is its attitude, striking an odd pairing of anti-segregation rhetoric with the tropes of ‘60s society follies. Though the point, I suppose, is that the racism inherent to segregation had permeated well into the minds of the Kennedy-era housewives of the South, their screwball antics of keeping up appearances, holding old grudges, and playing crude pranks on each other felt like a copout, a way to sugar-coat the strong medicine of civil rights that the film’s right-minded characters embrace.
And the characterizations are about what you’d expect for something like this: the wise African American housemaid, whose only crime is her inherent kindness and unease at rocking the boat; her sassy friend, whose instinct is to counter in the face of injustice through wide eyes and, when pushed, goofy retaliation that would have in reality assuredly led to her death; the dimwitted social pariah, whose status at the fringe of white society conditions her to be accepting of the black workers; the vicious keeping-up-appearances cypher, whose greatest talent is cloaking racism into bake sale planning and ladies’ card games; and, most importantly of all, there’s the college-educated Harper-Lee-in-training, whose free-spiritedness (single in her mid-20s!) has allowed her to become aghast at the superiority unleashed on the black workers and the white trash alike by a fake face of good manners.
If someone were to learn the history of the ’60s American South solely from films made in the last 20 years, he or she could be excused for thinking that little of the advancements seen by the civil rights movement came from actual movement within the subjugated black working class. At the heart of Hollywood’s idealized era, white people were the catalyst and the saviors for the movement in the face of their own. The Help tries to backtrack hesitantly by making its narrator one of the housemaids and arguing that the book at the center of the film sprang from the maids of Jackson. But the subliminal message is that advances came because of the whites, who empowered the blacks to fight.
When Medgar Evers is killed, the scene is treated as solemnly as the death of John Kennedy a few scenes later, but little of the impact it really made was felt. Rather, the film argues that the black housemaids only feel inclined to act (by way of said white girl’s gumption) after seeing one of their own arrested and violently struck (the film puzzlingly forgets that the charges against the woman were solid; she had earlier stolen a ring from her employer, though, naturally, only after being shamed by the employer for asking for an advance on her wages). Martin Luther King, Jr., is actually only mentioned in passing, and Emmett Till’s murder is relegated to an anachronistic newspaper, glanced and forgotten. Major figures and events that had immeasurable impact on the civil rights movement in the South are given a backseat to white-on-white melodrama, which, credit goes to the writing team, does move the story along but in an absurd, unbelievable, and, at times, offensive way.
It seems unfair to compare something like this to Mad Men, a show that actually aspires to be about characters rather than simplified scenarios, but I catch myself thinking about depictions of racism in the ‘60s on that show against what is found in The Help. There is an unforgettable moment in the fourth season where one of the best characters on the show dons black face and giddily performs a minstrel show. It’s impossible to not be made uncomfortable by seeing this character act in such a way and it’s an image that has colored, for lack of a better word, the way viewers look at him moving forward. What sets this racism apart from the racism in The Help is that Mad Men took a natural depiction of social acceptance of racial subordination and racist iconography. In the world of The Help, Roger Sterling would immediately be a villain to be destroyed. In reality, he would be a product of the time, a person who may be great in so many ways but who is blind to the hurtful actions he’s taken. He’s not a one-dimensional character to be dropped into the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ column but multi-dimensional with attributes and faults.
The Help circles around this when the film’s central villainess, the big-haired queen bee lording over her wannabes, uses anti-racist rhetoric to explain her own racism (arguing that her acceptance of segregated, underpaid black workers into her home makes her superior to the Mississippi racists who’d never allow any African American into their home, much less pay them a substandard wage). This is just one of the many ways the film layer characters within a set category of good or rotten, doing away with the nuances of good things about bad people or bad things about good people. The film seems to be most offended by the fact that this racist matriarch is still able to get ahead through most of the film because she glances over her faults and intimidates everyone into her corner. Yet ultimately the film walks a similar line as its antagonist, countering its subjugation of black characters in their own story to white heroes by honestly arguing that that’s the only way to make it palatable to a wide, white audience (and to Oscar voters) is both offensive and—sadly—probably accurate.
