The Help

• Full Review
• Trailer
• Tickets

Movie Details

• Genre: Drama
• Release Date: 2011-08-10 Nationwide
• Running Time: 137 min.
• Director: Tate Taylor
• Cast: Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Mike Vogel, Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, Jessica Chastain, Chris Lowell
• Producer: Brunson Green, Chris Columbus, Michael Barnathan
• Writer: Tate Taylor, Kathryn Stockett
• Distributor: Dreamworks Studios
• Official Site: The Help Official Site

A fast-talking, eye-rolling snarler, Emma Stone wears a truly terrible perm to play the allegedly dowdy Skeeter, a recent college graduate who returns to her family's Mississippi plantation in the summer of 1962 in The Help. In her absence, not only have her school friends become the casually, cruelly racist white establishment, but also her own beloved childhood maid (Cicely Tyson) has disappeared. Skeeter decides to write about her hometown from the perspective of the black women who work in every white household. Her ins to that world are dutiful maid Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer), whose inability to become wallpaper/doormat while at work has cost her a few jobs, most recently and spectacularly in the home of the town's coolly despicable queen bee, Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard). To accuse The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett's bestselling novel, of pushing the dreaded Magical Negro button would be a low blow. These women do actually say things like "Fried chicken just tend to make you feel better 'bout life," while pretty blonde women look on, beaming—but they're also victims of fairly realistic character flaws, almost as much as they're victims of circumstance. The Help is plainly a film about how talking becomes writing, which becomes activism, which turns into history. The night Medgar Evers is killed, Aibileen tries to comfort a paranoid Minny: "We ain't doin' civil rights, we just telling stories like they really happened"—a downplaying that rightfully makes her friend laugh.