Tate Taylor’s “The Help” is often condescending and emotionally manipulative. However, despite its use of cinematic gimmicks to control the audience’s tears and laughter, it is not a bad movie. The film narrates the lives of a series of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi and race relations in the South in the early 1960s. When Skeeter, a progressive white woman, returns to Jackson after college, she sets out to write a book about the lives and tribulations of these maids. The book and their stories become entrenched in the Civil Rights movement. The movie delivers two hours of enjoyable superficial pensiveness about race relations, effectively doing exactly what is expected of it, though nothing else. You will not regret watching “The Help,” but you will have forgotten most of it after a week. The ensemble cast, however, rises beyond the film’s limitations and features some of the best performances of the year, particularly from Viola Davis and the up-and-coming Jessica Chastain. Despite the screenplay’s one-dimensional, stereotypical characterizations—for example, the sassy, witty maid played by the charismatic Octavia Spencer—the performances are quite nuanced and, unlike the film’s emotional manipulation, truthful.
Ambivalent (B-)
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