2.23.2012

Academy Award Nominations: The Help

The Help can’t help but inspire conflicted emotions — it is set during the early years of the American Civil Rights movement, and it depicts black women doing about the only kind of work that was available to them at that time, especially in the South. Best Actress nominee Viola Davis has said in interviews that she felt some trepidation about taking the part of Aibilene because of the character’s job as a nanny to a white woman’s child. The first black actress to win an Oscar, Hattie McDaniel, won for playing a similar role. Davis decided to take the role because she found a way to make the character human, and not just a stereotype. Davis plays Aibilene with quiet strength, but you can feel her anger and frustration in every frame.

Octavia Spencer (Minny) and Jessica Chastain (Celia Foote) earned nominations for Best Supporting Actress, and the relationship between their characters gives the film its heart. Minny is fired from her job working for Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) and eventually finds a new job working for Celia, whom the high society women consider white trash. Celia treats Minny more humanly and more humanely than Hilly did, and Minny tries to help Celia navigate society.

The Help does something else that most stories dealing with this subject matter don’t – it exposes how stultifying the lives of rich white women of that time were. They went to college to get married, and when they got married, it was for the purpose of making babies, and when the babies were born, they were to be raised by the help. That left the white women to their society functions and games of bridge, and precious little else for their own enrichment and development. If Hilly seems bitchy and ridiculous, it’s because she has a little life and the one thing that might have improved her situation, i.e., raising her child, must, by the strictures of her society, be handed off to Aibilene.

The cast is excellent – if the actors had fallen into caricatures, the film could have been awful. Davis, Spencer, and to a lesser extent Chastain are getting a lot of attention for their performances, and deservedly so. Howard deserves a special mention. Her character could have been too ridiculous to take seriously as a villain, or too menacing to reveal the awful mind-numbing limitations of her situation. She walks a fine line expertly. And Sissy Spacek is a stitch as her mother.

In tone, The Help brings to mind Fried Green Tomatoes. I don’t know that I’d suggest that as a double feature – I’m a little too fond of both barbeque and pie. But both films deal with the empowerment of women living in cultures that limit their spheres.

The Help is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Davis), and twice for Best Supporting Actress (Spencer, Chastain).

Watch the trailer for The Help.

This review, by LR Simon, is part of our series on the 84th Academy Awards.

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