The Help is an old-fashioned bit of long-simmering movie stew where everyone is colored by their life experience, but good is pretty much good and bad is pretty much bad with enough character archetypes that there is someone for almost everyone (who’s not male) to identify with.

I liked it well enough. It got me choked up a half-dozen times for a half-dozen different reasons (who knew that a woman slapping a small child off camera would make me so pained?) and rarely surprised me in any real way. But this tiny slice of the south, where the civil rights war is close enough to smell, but permanent enough to make people lazy about their life inside of it, works as a summer diversion that works out what used to be worked out by reading a good paperback.

The highs and the lows of the film are represented by mediocre direction from a first timer (aside from a direct-to-video title that has a 3-screen, $7000 run) whose work is not disastrous, but adds little (though it is impossible to know how much credit to give him for the performances) and a cast that is truly, luxuriously, surprisingly remarkable.

Long-time readers have gone through my ranting about Emma Stone and Viola Davis alike. (You’ll be reading me touting the genius of Jean Dujardin for the next 6 months.) But neither is The Story here. Emma is really The Mary here. She gives a solid performance as the center of the universe of characters, spending a lot of frames reacting to the other characters. And Viola, who is like Green Lantern with a massive walloping fist coming out of what seems like nowhere to crush you emotionally, is The Rock on the other side. It’s a beautiful performance, but it’s almost all nuance and people don’t hold that in the kind of esteem they hold something showy.

Bryce Dallas Howard gives the best performance of her career… as a bitter, bitter bitch. Some will call her character a caricature, but I thought she played it beautifully, with tears and real pain always lingering behind her confident eyes. And Octavia Spencer, who has that unforgettable face, is the discovery on this film, walking the line between a very real, pained woman and the caricature of a southern mammy… when walking that line IS the character. My favorite parts of her performance are when she talks about doing something that everyone is laughing about, but which she truly considers an unchristian action on her part. She doesn’t overplay it. She knows why everyone else is laughing. But she carries it as a burden. Beautiful subtlety.

But for me, The Story of The Help is Jessica Chastain, who not only steals every scene she gets near with seemingly no effort at all, but set off a big light bulb for me… because it took me a while to figure out it was her. The last time I had one of these moments was with Rachel McAdams, whose performances in Wedding Crashers, The Notebook, Mean Girls, and The Hot Chick convinced me that she was The Next Great Actress… since all four performances were so strong… and none of them could really be connected to the actress in any of the other ones. She was (and is) both a striking movie beauty and a chameleon. And you don’t see that too often.

Chastain, in The Help, is a more connected version of Marilyn Monroe. She gets the moments here than Monroe never got… real pain… real desire… all while embodying a goofy white-trash bombshell whose entry in a simple dress turns every head in a room. In The Tree of Life, she is a young Sissy Spacek, perhaps a bit more patrician, a beautiful, loving, woman in a world she doesn’t control, but which she survives with a simple warmth and emotion. In Take Shelter, she dances with Michael Shannon, a reflection of where his character’s mind is going as the story progresses. And in The Debt, as a younger version of the Helen Mirren character, she minds her senior, but also creates a young woman who is both as fragile and as fierce as she must be to do what her character does. You might be able to connect the 3 redheads visually, but it is almost as though her face is different in each of the films. She lets us into the soul of her characters, as though each had a different set of eyes. And there is still Coriolanus due (after premiering at Berlin) at TIFF next month.

Chastain and Spencer and Davis and Howard can all be pushed hard for Oscar nominations for this film and two of them could get nominations. People will push back at mention of this film as an Oscar candidate. And indeed, with the new voting system and an early slot, Best Picture seems a long way from likely. But the performances are not only excellent, they are sticky. I’m not sure how a studio manages 4 runs in the same category on the same movie. I guess we’re about to find out.

And my advice on the film, which I have written elsewhere… if you find yourself wanting to go, based on the book or ads or the trailer, go. You will likely be happy you did. If you are turned off by any of that, don’t go. You will likely find more of what was bugging you. I have to respect a movie that knows what it is and delivers that to the people who want it, without trying to be more or to convince anyone of the value of the effort. I do wish David Gordon Green had directed. But that’s water under the bridge.

(Edited: To reflect Tate Taylor’s first film… at Don Murphy’s request.)

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