By Dan Little
Looking over my top 10 it hit me that this year straight up sucked in terms of great straight drama...all of the should-be-great films that Oscar nominated are very "meh" inducing, except, and I am going to have my film degree postponed for saying this, The Help. Ok, ok, I get it. The Help isn't in black and white and silent, it doesn't deal with the very real pain of a dying loved one, it's not about some guy who changed baseball, nor is it about the pure love of cinema. The Help is a film many of us have seen before, but does that make it bad? No, because we have seen most stories told already, and surely we have seen each of the Best Picture 9 told in much better ways than their current incarnations, and that is why I believe The Help is so wonderful. Instead of trying to be bold, instead of flash and pizzaz this film goes back to a simpler style of filmmaking that tells a story and lets the actors wrestle with it. It has a message, but it never feels preachy; it has humor but it is not a comedy, likewise it has drama, but certainly isn't a drama. In the most generic of genre terms it is a period piece loaded with some of the best performances this year.
Meryl who? Whatsherface Close? No no, this year belongs to Viola Davis. Davis is an actress of true grace and strength. Recall a few years back when John Patrick Shanley had the great audacity to cast this relatively unknown woman in a role where not only did she have but 5 minutes of screen time, she was to share it with the screen legend Meryl Streep. This is a situation that would worry most any actress I would dare to say, but Shanley knew what he was doing to cast Davis. The minute she steps on screen Streep disappeared in a 5 minute blaze of acting glory. Here director Tate Taylor has the great insight and fortune to bring Davis back to the screen in an oscar prestige flick and give her an enormous amount of screen time. It is a disservice to the performances surrounding her to insist that she holds the film up on her own, but dear lord if she isn't the glue holding all those other fantastic performances together.
For those who have not seen the film, as I am sure most of my more snobby friends will have not, Davis plays a domestic maid in 1960s Mississippi where race relations are not as cordial as we find in contemporary Chicago. Davis is the maid of Elizabeth Leefolt, a white upper middle-class wife with nothing better to do than play bridge with her gal pals and ignore her daughter so Davis' Abileen may take care of her. The film follows Abileen and her friend and fellow maid Minny (a firecracker Octavia Spencer) as they endure the awful mental and emotional abuse that comes from years taking care of someone else's home and family while yours are far away across town, and you can't even use the same bathroom as the white folk. The story is populated by fiercely ignorant housewives led by Bryce Dallas Howard's Hilly Holbrook in her most scathingly venomous performance. We are also allowed the privilege of seeing some others who are not so ignorant which brings us to our vehicle for the story Emma Stone's Skeeter. Skeeter is a progressive, college educated woman who finds little in common with her snooze-fest Leave it to Beaver childhood lady friends and aspires to be a great writer. Through this desire she decides to write a tell-all book about the horrors the help must endure, thus our story. She befriends Minny and Abileen, though it takes some time and courage on all parts, and eventually squeezes some stories out of other maids. Stone is incredibly believable and endearing in this role, which despite its fixed point at the center, is less evolved as some of the other characters. The always delightful Allison Janney plays her sick mother in the way only Janney can. It is the other sympathetic white character, Celia Foote, whom I truly loved. Celia is played by Jessica Chastain, an actress who came out of nowhere this year with 5 remarkably diverse and well-received turns, plays Celia in such a way it really stole my heart. I got her. Her character is one that could easily fall to caricature and silliness, and dont get me wrong Celia does provide some of the bigger laughs, but she is not a cartoon. She is effervescent and loveable and earnest, and Chastain plays her with an unaffect paradoxical sense of grounded levity. I raise Chastain and Davis up as their roles both tiptoed on cautious edges of spoof, sentimentality, and severity, but both walked each role with grace, strength, and dignity.
So yes, The Help is what it is, and not much more, but if you see it you will understand why it is one of the most purely entertaining, incredibly moving, and undoubtedly best ensemble performance of the year.
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