The Help
Director: Tate Taylor
Starring: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Bryce Dallas Howard
Based on the best-selling book by Kathryn Stockett (who is best friends with the director), The Help is a colourful honeyed melodrama set in America's Deep South during the 1960s. Using the civil rights movement as a historical backdrop, the tale takes the focus away from those leading the struggle and zooms in on the African-American maids – the help – working in such a climate of racism. Their stories are enticed out by white do-gooder Skeeter (Stone), who has returned to her hometown from university with sharpened eyes, much to the dismay of her somewhat small-minded Stepford-like peers, led by the meticulously coiffed Hilly Holbrook (Dallas Howard), a woman pushing for the town's maids to use separate bathrooms. While Holbrook delivers teeth-clenching scenes, it's thankfully the maids themselves who take the central moments. Davis's Aibileen is the stoic, eye-rolling heroine, a woman who devoted more of her life to raising white children than her own, while Spencer's feisty Minny provides the climax's fist-pumping revenge. Overall, it's a very sugary take on a period of intense social upheaval that doesn't so much confront the issues as sentimentally bake them in one of Minny's famous pies. But as an enjoyable drama, it works immensely.