The Help Review: Novel or Screen, It’s a World Worth Knowing

The Help (by Kathryn Stockett) is one of those stories that don’t come along often enough.

I had the novel on my shelves for over two years before finally picking it up in anticipation of the film, because like every die hard reader (and writer) I need to read the novel before I can watch an adaptation. I’m not sure why this is, exactly. It might be some weird sense of loyalty to the author, or the desire to form images for the characters in my head before Hollywood decides what they look and act like, or just the plain old (99% of the time true) fact that the books are always better.

The Help is no exception to that rule. The film isn’t bad, not by a long stretch, but I don’t anyone who read the novel will come out thinking they did it justice.

The story is set in 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi during the heart of the Civil Rights movement, a place where tensions ran high and putting a toe out of line could leave you destitute or worse. Much worse. The book is narrated by three women: Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer), who are black maids working in white households, and Skeeter (Emma Stone), a privileged white girl recently graduated from Ole Miss and hankering for a career as a writer. Aibileen’s special talent is raising babies, while Minny’s is cooking (and getting fired for sass-mouthing her bosses). Aibilieen works for Skeeter’s friend Elizabeth Leefolt (Ahna O’Reilly) raising her Baby Girl Mae Mobley and their friend Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard) recently fired Minny for not using the colored toilet.

Minny got back at her though, with a Terrible Awful deed that will drop your jaw and leave you collapsed with laughter, along with Hilly’s mother (played by Sissy Spacek).

For her part, Skeeter is dealing with being the only girl her age who hasn’t got a husband, wants a career, and doesn’t think it’s right the way people treat the black women in their lives. After all, they raise their children, cook, and keep their homes and secrets safe. After having a job application to a New York publisher declined, the editor there agrees to read pages of an idea Skeeter pitches – she wants to write about what it’s like to be a colored maid in Jackson from the maids’ point-of-view.

This turns out to be harder than she expects; in talking to the maids she begins to understand the culture of fear, violence, and disrespect that ensures the maids’ silence.

This is a 400+ page novel, so obviously details are going to be left out, sometimes ones that are treasured pieces of the story. What is missing from this movie, though, adds up to more than a few inconsequential bits and made me feel like a whole piece of the pie (hehe) is missing.

I didn’t care for the voiceover, which almost always suggests lazy exposition to me, but my biggest complaints all deal with the alterations that were made to a few of the main characters and relationships. First of all, Hilly Holbrook is a terrible racist of a woman. Let’s get that out of the way. That said, no one is all good or all bad, and Hilly does have some good qualities in the book – some that Aibileen even mentions from time to time. Howard’s Hilly Holbrook teeters on the edge of a caricature of the “Southern Racist White Woman,” which bothered me a little bit. In the opposite area, director Tate Taylor softened Skeeter’s mother (played by Allison Janney) into a woman barely recognizable to readers of the novel. The character is a rigid, high-born Southern woman who yes, loves her daughter and is often the center of hilarious dialogue, but is also unapologetic for her part in a deed that breaks Skeeter’s heart. In the movie she gets an entire scene in which she in turn plays the hero and the loving, proud mother that didn’t exist in Stockett’s novel. Once again, it made a character out to be 100% likable and therefore flat instead of deeply layered.

The change that disappointed me most was the relationship between Minny and her employer, Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain). Celia is an outsider, a white trash woman from a place called Sugar Ditch, MS who got herself pregnant and married to one of the most eligible bachelors in Jackson – and Hilly’s ex-boyfriend to boot. Instead of the multi-dimensional, lovingly sculpted character in the book, this Celia is utilized for the easy laugh. Yes, she’s inappropriate and ridiculous in the novel, but she’s also desperate, and sad, and one of the best white human beings we get to meet. The friendship between her and Minny, and later Celia’s husband Johnny, is also reduced to little more than a vehicle for laughs, when it’s actually heartbreaking and poignant and one of my favorite parts of the story.

Minny herself, along with the film as a whole, was coated with more sugar than I would have liked, given the gravity of the subject matter. Minny lost the anger boiling underneath her gruff exterior, and the screenplay eliminated any real fear of reprisal for what Skeeter and the women were doing by telling stories about their lives as colored help. With the exception of a (passing, really) mention of the Medgar Evars murder, it felt as though nothing worse than maybe getting fired lurks as a consequence. In reality, these women could have been beaten or killed for what they were doing and I would have liked to have felt that ever-present, running undercurrent of fear.

All of those nitpicks may be due to my love for the novel, and there are plenty of things the movie does well.

The performances are well-executed, even breathtaking at times, and I can’t imagine a better cast being assembled. Emma Stone’s Skeeter is emotional, spunky, and naïve and makes us feel all the right things at the right moment. Other standout performances for me came from Viola Davis, who also jerked the heartstrings, Jessica Chastain, who I’d bet money read the novel, because she understood the complicated Celia even if the audience did not, and Chris Lowell, who played Skeeter’s love interest Stuart. Fantastic. There is absolutely nothing to complain about as far as the acting in this film.

The cinematography, costumes, and set design are all pieces of a perfection pie that anchor us firmly in our time and place and don’t let us go.

The heart of the story is kept intact, and this is a tale that will make you laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time.  There are some small, quiet moments that are done very well, and in those scenes you do understand exactly what’s being attempted, risked, and maybe accomplished.

You know that feeling when you can tell a movie is getting close to the end, and you just want it to get there already because you know exactly what’s going to happen and you have to pee and there’s laundry to fold and…you get the point. You will not feel like that watching The Help. I could have watched these characters, this place, this tale, forever.

It’s a story that needs to be told, about a time in history that too often gets glossed over because people are embarrassed about the actions we took or the way people were treated. I know I learned some history I’d never (or don’t recall) hearing about before and, shameful or not, it is our past. The people who lived it, who were sacrificed so we could get through it, deserve to be remembered. The movie brings that world to life, albeit with less day to day fear than probably existed, and gives us a glimpse into the lives of a community that I would never get tired of knowing.

Photos Courtesy of Dale Robinett and Dreamworks