The Help boasts of solid performances from Emma Stone and Viola Davis, writes Ankur Pathak.What is pleasantly surprising and distinctive about The Help, adapted from Kathryn Stockett's best-selling debut novel of the same name, is that though it conveys lucidly the disturbing racial injustice in 1960s America, it does so without melodrama or too many clichés.
Viola Davis plays Aibileen Clark, a black maid in the southern state of Mississippi at a time when the civil rights movement is gathering momentum in America. Self-effacing, and stoical, Aibileen's selfless affection for her charges is unmarred by the racial tensions in the white households she works for and in the larger society outside. Although she is haunted by the demons of her past -- losing her only son has embittered her somewhat.
Quite different in temperament is her colleague, the outspoken Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer). Minny's frequently witty counter-attacks on her employers are unrestrained, blunt and smack of retribution sometimes.
When newly graduated Eugenia 'Skeeter' Phelan (Emma Stone) dumps the matrimonial dreams of her pseudo-modernistic mother to make a career as a writer, she is not only shattering the assumptions of her well-settled friends by choosing a career over marriage, but also picking on an almost-taboo topic for her first novel.
It includes documenting the everyday lives of the domestic helps, who really are more like slaves. The film looks honestly at what it is actually like to be 'the help' in a claustrophobically prejudiced society that poses as being forward-looking.
Where the film shines is in going beyond being a flat portrayal of an alienated race, and examining other aspects of the lives of Aibileen and Minny, that lie beyond their being maids in a white person's house.
There is an everywoman quality about these two. There are Minny's jokes that Aibileen just cannot stop guffawing at, and there's the altogether sparkling persona of Minny Jackson.
It is Skeeter's clandestinely planned literary
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