Review: Film

The Help dir Tate Taylor, Jessica Chastain, Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Sissy Specek

Faithful. Taken from Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help, on last Summer’s reading hit list, the film is an up-lifting tale, about black maids who raised the white children of America’s south in the 1960s. Though sanitised for general consumption, the film has some cracking performances: Viola Davis as Abileen, Octavia Spencer as the mischievous pie-maker, Minnie, Jessica Chastain as gauche Celia Foote and Bryce Dallas Howard as the spiteful Hilly Holbrook. Segregation is routine and Hilly decides to impose the ‘home sanitation initiative’ – an outside toilet for ‘coloureds’ - in Jackson, Mississippi. In the background is the assassination of civil rights campaigner Medger Evers, pre Martin Luther King; with the shocking image of his son, heart-broken, on the front of Time Magazine, providing one of the few moments of real tension. Yet Abileen finds her own independent voice, as do the other helps, who aid Skeeter – white and fresh out of the University of Mississippi – to compile a book about all their experiences. Its development, and the subsequent fall-out, is the film’s meat and drink……faithful recreations of hair-dos and home-bakes add to the 60s' feel, in which conservative America's crisp, gingham is as stiff and outmoded as their dyed-in-the-wool principles.......