The Help

4.40
    The Help
    2011

    Synopsis

    Aibileen Clark is a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children and has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson is an African-American maid who has often offended her employers despite her family's struggles with money and her desperate need for jobs; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a young white woman who has recently moved back home after graduating college to find out her childhood maid has mysteriously disappeared. These three stories intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around "the help"; yet they are always kept at a certain distance because of racial lines.

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    Cast

    • Emma StoneEugenia "Skeeter" Phelan
    • Viola DavisAibileen Clark
    • Octavia SpencerMinny Jackson
    • Bryce Dallas HowardHilly Holbrook
    • Jessica ChastainCelia Foote
    • Allison JanneyCharlotte Phelan
    • Ahna O'ReillyElizabeth Leefolt
    • Sissy SpacekMissus Walters
    • Anna CampJolene French
    • ​Christopher LowellStuart Whitworth

    Recommendations

    • 88

      Orlando Sentinel

      Davis and Spencer give faces and fully-fleshed out lives to women who must have been more than what they did for a living as The Help.
    • 88

      Rolling Stone

      A deeply touching human story filled with humor and heartbreak is rare in any movie season, especially summer. That's what makes The Help an exhilarating gift.
    • 80

      Variety

      A stirring black-empowerment tale aimed squarely at white audiences, The Help personalizes the civil rights movement through the testimony of domestic servants working in Jackson, Miss., circa 1963.
    • 75

      Chicago Tribune

      Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material.
    • 70

      The New Yorker

      The Help is, in some way, crude and obvious, but it opens up a broad new swath of experience on the screen, and parts of it are so moving and well acted that any objections to what's second-rate seem to matter less as the movie goes on. [15 & 22 August 2011, p. 96]
    • 70

      Arizona Republic

      The acting is uniformly excellent, and the cause - dragging the beginnings of civil rights into Jackson, Miss., at great risk - couldn't be nobler. What the film lacks is a strong point of view.
    • 63

      Boston Globe

      The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time.
    • 60

      The Hollywood Reporter

      Taylor does capture the Jim Crow era and its anxieties well, but his characters tend toward the facile and his white heroine is too idealized.

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