Evil has a new face; it’s powdered, blushed, preened and void of cold sores (well, mostly), auburn hair swings at a totally non-accidental angle around its milk-white jaw and it speaks at you from tastefully painted lips: ‘There are some real racists in this town.’
A snigger is heard from the film theatre. The ubiquitous hypocrisy of cushty suburban life reaches racial-political heights in Tate Taylor’s The Help, a screen adaptation of the novel by Kathryn Stockett.
The evil in question is personified by the inherently racist town bitch, Hilly Holbrook. In between the sop-induced tears and sniffles in the film theatre, you’ll hear almost equal amounts of tuts and sighs of disapproval, most of which will be aimed at Miss Hilly. Played by the stoney-faced Bryce Dallas Howard, she is the focal point of our moral indignation, which the audience is encouraged to relish from its relatively fair and right-thinking historical stance. Heads quietly shake and popcorn falls from mouth as the entirely nonfictional injustices of the 1960‘s are revealed.
Emma Stone plays the young aspiring writer in The Help who secretly assists the local black maids of her PC-backward town to tell their story - something which seems to come naturally to a character brought up among rife gossip and telltales. Finally, this gossip has a just cause.
So far, we have the baddy, the goody and the down-trodden socially disadvantaged. Sounds like a pretty black and white tearjecker so far (please excuse the pun).
Enter Celia Foote. Played by Jessica Chastain, Celia plays the role of thwarting our prejudices; a two-dimensional bimbo to begin with, her heart-breaking story becomes the unlikely one to give the film its real warmth.
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