The Help was a pretty good film. It had some really good laughs and Bryce Dallas Howard stole the show. Emma Stone was good but was swallowed up by her blonde hair and southern accent. She acted more as the vehicle of the maids than anything else which worked for the film but didn't add anything to her own character. Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer were marvelous. They seemed the most real of all the characters and you felt for them which was the film was trying to do.
What I liked about it was that it was a film about civil rights which showed both sides. The extreme racism of the white characters, especially Howard, made them seem almost like parodies but there were people like that. However, not all white characters were portrayed like that and you see the struggle of being an upstanding racist white citizen. When Alison Janney recounts how she dismissed her maid you see that struggle which is more powerful than the racism of Howard. You can laugh at Howard's character for her extreme take but Janney's character makes you feel the deep rooted racism that's hard to escape and it becomes more real for the audience. "I'm not racist, but..." is what I see in Janney's character which translates well for a modern audience.
The maid's predicament is well played out by not overdoing it and making them seem real. A modern audience would react in the same way which is the strength of this film dealing with this period of time. The pie section is perhaps a little extreme but something you would want to do and maybe talk about doing. And Davis and Spencer give great performances. Their emotions control you as you watch and you feel what they feel. Octavia Spencer definitely deserved the Academy Award.
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