Film review: Simplistic film disappoints

The Help - is a rather sanitised account of racism in the Deep South during the 1960s

I feel I must tread carefully with this week's view, since for a considerable number of readers Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help can do no wrong.

I must admit to not having read the book myself, but I'm reliably informed that it depicts racial inequalities in 1960s Mississippi with sometimes shocking frankness.

Based on these reports, it would seem that little of the book's directness has made it into the film adaptation. What we receive instead is a rather safe, sanitised portrait of the lives of the “home help”, stripped of any sort of abruptness that could cause an audience discomfort.

The most obvious manifestation of this sanitisation is the lack of overt racial abuse.

Considering the film is set during the height of the Ku Klux Klan's influence, when black people were routinely attacked, even lynched, there's something slightly odd in the way The Help's racial discrimination is confined to the niceties of domestic management.

This isn't to say that such practices as having separate bathrooms for black people and white people were not widespread, and objectionable, but the film seems reluctant to confront the decidedly more sinister, organised, and violent side of American racism. Racist attacks are referred to by the characters during the course of the film, and there is, of course, a nasty subtext to discrimination on the domestic level (the black help cannot use white people's bathrooms), but even this seems to be rather glossed over; the discrimination is made to feel petty and arbitrary, rather than what it really is, the product of a twisted and degenerate social anthropology,

A rather unfortunate side effect of this rose-tinted perspective is a feeling, by the film's close, of a certain self-satisfied triumphalism.

After the brave ladies ‘the help' have their accounts published, we're treated to a number of increasingly saccharine mini-endings in which parents and children are reconciled, masters and servants discourse together like equals, and there's a general feeling of racism having been beaten once and for all.

But it's a false sense of self-congratulation, a sentimental victory manufactured by the narrative.

Racism, of course, did not cease to exist in the early '60s, and although some passing mention is made of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, The Help seems very much wrapped up in its own little world, disconnected from wider American history.

This transforms the film into a rather simplistic re-reading of racial discrimination for what, I suspect, will be a predominantly white audience, and this in turn results in a few moments of quite cringe-worthy condescension.

At one moment, for example, Minnie (one of the most vociferous and eloquent of the ‘help') leaves her abusive husband and seeks refuge with her employers following the publication of her account.

In a baffling moment, they offer her “a job for life”, to beaming smiles all round. The Help fails to recognise how working as home help for the rest of one's life might add up to something less than total equality for a talented black woman, and yet, according to the film's value system, this is apparently considered a satisfactory outcome.

There are still things here to enjoy.

The film is almost, but not quite, rescued by the spirited performances of Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer.

It's simply a shame that the drama in which they find themselves is, for me, unequal to their talents.

Rating: **

N2 film reviews – supported by Newbury Vue