Big Screen Peter: The Help

“The Help” is a broad base, reassuring film. One that alludes to something awful, but with a shoulder pat and a wink, letting us know all is going to be just fine. It's laced kool-aid.

And, in a way, there's nothing wrong with that. Our world is filled with — pardon the pun— white washing. Look no further than your child's history book: we didn't really exterminate indians, our forefathers really were beacons of righteousness.

Building palatable narratives out of horrific events is as old as time itself. So no, it might not be horribly wrong to make a movie that turns a gnarled, backward society into a goofy, sugar coated a caricature, but it sure as hell doesn't make it completely right either. It certainly doesn't equate cinematic greatness.

The creation does make it a pointed, downright cynical calculation. It's crowd pleasing Oscar-bait. And, as many know, the ploy has been successful, for it sits as one of nine up for Best Picture.

Judged purely as a story, “The Help” is compelling. No matter how cloying or purposefully ignorant a movie is, if the baseline narrative is strong, it's going to outshine all the surrounding noise. There's no doubt about the noise level here.

“The Help” is a story of reconciliation. It stars Emma Stone as Skeeter Phelan, a determined girl, recently graduated and hell-bent to make it as a writer. As a rich girl from Jackson, Miss., though, that drive isn't expected. She's supposed to get married, to have kids, but she wants more and starts to see the dichotomous world she inhabits. One in which black maids rear the high society (read: white) children and, in many ways, are their true mothers, but eventually get tossed away like forgotten dolls.

Writing a book from that perspective, at least in the 1960s, is both novel and incredibly dangerous. Hell, it's downright wishful thinking really: retroactive courage to make a white girl feel better about her upbringing. And not terribly inventive either from a current perspective.

What little redemptive hope there is to be found in the film lies with that character of Skeeter. But even she is subjected to arbitrary concessions to market-tested plot lines. She's given a “love” interest in the form of Stuart Whitworth (Chris Lowell). The plot device is as poorly calculated as it is executed. It serves as an example of the illogical narrative that consistently strikes down any sort of narrative gains the film might have otherwise garnered.

The recounted stories, however, are compelling. Yet, just like the movie, it's all weighed down by general buffoonery and outlandish performances. “The Help” isn't depicting an erstwhile southern society, it's aping a Hollywood conception. It's puffing up stock characters and trotting them out in front of cameras.

That it was able to garner an Oscar nomination for best picture illustrates the increasing desire within the Academy to pander to an ever-growing audience eager for simple-minded moralizing narrative films.

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