Released in 2011 | Directed by Tate Taylor

I have some serious issues with The Help, and I find it a very hard movie to review. There are good aspects to it - inspired performances from Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer and generally capable filmmaking - which at first had me walking away with a good, albeit mild, review in my pocket. But after putting off the review for several days, I began to think about the film a little more, and my opinion began to change. Overall, despite its pleasant aftertaste and semi-sweet segregation story, The Help is not a very good movie. This is why:

As an amateur history buff with plans to make a career out of that interest, I immediate noticed some pretty glaring flaws in The Help that take some steam out of its heavy-handed anti-racist message. Firstly, and probably most importantly, the movie glossed over some of the awful ordeals that black housemaids went through during the time: notably sexual abuse and lynching, both of which were very real threats for many maids working in white households. I also noticed that the film pays little attention to black men: many are abusive or simply not around for the majority of the film. Aibileen and Minny have a pretty strong “black” vernacular, eat fried chicken blissfully at many points throughout the film and generally seem unaware of the civil rights activism that was historically happening in Jackson, Mississippi at the time. Like many a movie before it, The Help frames the civil rights movement as white people helping black people, and this is a crucial misunderstanding. From novelist Martha Southgate’s review of the film and book:

The architects, visionaries, prime movers, and most of the on-ground labourers of the civil rights movement were African-Americans. Many white Americans stood beside them, and some even died beside them, but it was not their fight - and more important, it was not their idea.

The movie is also pretty wrought with tropes and clichés. The character of Hilly is often portrayed as a comical villain who gets her comeuppance through a problem pie, although she is clearly a bitter and hateful racist. The movie’s full of the Magical Negro stock character, and a quick look at Wikipedia’s page for the Mammy archetype will show that the film is also an apt continuation of the myth. The movie’s often cheesy and phoned-in emotionally. Most importantly, the character of Skeeter is clearly an author avatar for Stockett, which helps to frame the film as a sweet coming-of-age story for a young white protagonist who uses the experiences of African-American maids to A) frame her own life and help her understand the challenges she’s going through and B) help her get a job in New York City. If any movie this year should have committed to having the protagonist be African-American, it’s this one.

The Help has become an extremely popular book and subsequent movie, and although it’s frustrating it’s also easy to understand why. The movie supports gender roles that were worn out twenty years ago, a vision of soft racism that betrays the realities of the time, and the myth that there’s a happy ending to it all. Stockett might have hoped to show how we’ve beaten racism, because look how bad it was back then! But the battle isn’t won yet. No matter how many white people write books or do their part to fight racism, it’s not our battle, and it never will be. To read more about the inaccurate history of The Help, check out this ColorLines article, a review of the film by Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC, and an open statement from the Association of Black Women Historians.

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