The 31 Best Films I Saw in 2011 reaches installment number nine. Emma Stone is one of those actresses that are stunning beyond words. When I first saw her in Zombieland, I was taken by both her beauty as well as her charisma. Her other roles in films like Easy A, The House Bunny, The Rocker, and Superbad cemented her recurring role as the unlikeliest of heroines. Flash forward two years later, and she proves she is truly a talent who can act when it comes to serious material, and she could carry her own in the midst of a stellar ensemble cast.
The Best I Saw in 2011: Tate Taylor's The Help
Based on the Kathryn Stockett novel, the film centers on Skeeter (Stone) as an aspiring writer in the South in the middle of the Civil Rights movement. She comes home to Jackson from the University of Mississippi to find that her beloved childhood maid, Constantine, is gone. Whenever she questions her mother (Allison Janney), the inquiry is brushed off.
The film also takes focus on Aibileen (Viola Davis) as she laments the life as part of the help. She is saddened when she realizes how much of her time was spent with the white children that she never had time for her own children. This is magnified by the notion that she recently lost her only son.
At the same time, Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard) is pushing for an initiative to have separate bathrooms for the colored help. She pushes fear-mongering notions, under the guise of the “Home Help Sanitation Initiative,” that they have diseases different than that of white people. It reaches a point where Hilly fires the maid of her house, Minny (Octavia Spencer), for using the in-house bathroom.
Out of disdain for the treatment of the help on the part of Hilly and others along her train of thought, Skeeter gets the notion to tell the stories of the maid. Despite finding out that writing such accounts are against the law in Mississippi, they go ahead anyway. Soon, all the maids are giving their stories for the book. Once its published, it causes a public outcry and one incriminating detail causes Hilly to maintain a stance that the published book is not about Jackson, Mississippi.
Stone plays the role that will surprise many viewers who are accustomed to the comedic roles in previous films. As great as Stone is in the role of Skeeter, its Davis as Aibileen that gives much gravity to the time and place this film is set in. Her pain and loss is palpable in her mannerisms and in her facial language. You can see it in her eyes.
Octavia Spencer steals the show as the sassy Minny. Her subplot with Howard's Hilly comes to a fulfilling close, and is one of the most effectively pulled-off, gross-out gags in any film. Howard as Hilly is probably one of the most despicable characters to be brought to film in recent years. Even sadder is the thought there are still people today with Hilly's mindset.
