The Help

In The Help, set during the civil rights era, an aspiring journalist decides to write a book about the African-American domestics in the small Missis­sippi town where she grew up. The movie, adapted by Tate Taylor from Kathryn Stockett's best seller, is a glossy Hollywood potboiler that uses a serious theme and historical context as cover. It's melodrama passing as drama.

The preposterous fable sets a group of spirited, courageous, loving black women against the white-gloved white women of the Junior League who abuse them. These caricatured villains are led by Hilly Hol­brook (Bryce Dallas Howard), who sends her maid, Minny Jackson (Octavia Spen­cer), out in a hurricane to use an outhouse so she won't spread her diseases in the sacred Holbrook bathroom, then fires her summarily when Minny overrides her edict. Doubtless Hilly's mistreatment of Minny is no worse than what many domestics suffered in Mississippi, but the movie piles on so many offenses that Hilly and her cohorts begin to seem like the devil's spawn. The young wife (Ahna O'Reilly) who em­ploys Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) shunts her child onto Aibileen because she has no feeling for her. (She only intervenes to beat the little girl when she embarrasses her.)