Eric's Movie Bin: The Help
by Eric Naud,
September 22, 2011, page 15.....

I came into the theater expecting to only like the movie; I came out from a heartfelt experience of which I rarely have been through. Based on Kathryn Stockett’s hit book of the same name, The Help is a genuinely satisfying film. I laughed, I almost cried, I enjoyed every second of it. In this film, aspiring writer Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) decides to write a book about the black maids who worked for the white aristocrats. This may seem like a simple thing to do, but this movie, and the book, takes place in early ‘60s Mississippi, during the height of the Jim Crow laws, and just for interviewing black maids you could be arrested.
Just as they were back then, Civil Rights issues are everywhere in this movie. Yet combined with this seriousness is a healthy dose of humor. It is not slightly sarcastic humor like in Angela’s Ashes, but real belly-laughing humor, especially in one scene where we see the results of Skeeter replacing a word on an invitation for a bridge club run by Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) Holbrook. Hilly is quite a bully, and I do not use that term lightly. That woman is a stubborn pigheaded racist... Well, I don’t think the word I’m thinking about is appropriate for a local newspaper. Of course, it isn’t the snotty rich white girls who steal the show; it is the brave black maids. The term ‘brave’ I don’t use lightly because, again, this was during the era of segregation, and any high school student would know that in the south Civil Rights activists were killed. The performances of Viola Davis as the motherly maid Aibileen (who also narrates the film), and Octavia Spencer as daring maid Minny, are the high point of the film. Aibileen is also working as a nanny for her master’s toddler girl, resulting in a relationship that moved me tremendously. After being fired by Hilly Hollbrook for using the house bathroom (segregation, again), Minny gets hired by a social outcast, Celia (Jessica Chastian), just after Minny gives a pie to her old master made of... well, if you have read the book, you know what it’s made of. They start a relationship that is also touching, and uplifting, too.
Even though I understand why some people would be offended by this movie, especially with the Southern dialect of the maids (“You is kind, you is smart, you is important.”), all in all, I would call this movie a true crowd pleaser.

3½ out of 4