Octavia Spencer: You Can't 'Help' But Feel This Film

Kathryn Stockett's popular 2009 novel "The Help" arrives this week with a faithful and very affecting big-screen adaptation. It's simplistic at times, and flirts with manipulation, but it's also a deeply touching and well-acted film.


Set in early 1960s Mississippi, "The Help" tells the story of African-American maids who care for the children and homes of wealthy white families, encountering horrible cruelty and racism, even a century after the Civil War and a decade after Brown v. Board of Education. Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) are the two primary maids, while the third protagonist is Skeeter (Emma Stone), a young college graduate who decides to write a book about the maids and their experiences.


It's the most female of movies - for once, it's the male characters who are underdeveloped and largely inconsequential to the plot.


The film was written and directed, mostly competently, by Tate Taylor, a near-neophyte who had the great fortune of being the lifelong best friend of Stockett, the author of the book.


Now, a whole lot of recent Hollywood movies about the civil rights era - especially "Mississippi Burning" and "Ghosts of Mississippi"- and have had the problem of being told primarily through white people's eyes, with white protagonists and primary concern with the white characters' journeys. The filmmakers of "The Help" seem very, very concerned with avoiding this problem, a sense I got from the deeply bizarre Entertainment Weekly article last week in which just about everyone associated with the film mentioned it.


Does it succeed in doing so? Partially. On the one hand, the two maid characters are the clear heart and soul of the film, and the movie makes their story the most compelling aspect by a mile. But on the other hand, why do these women need someone to write a book for them?


Much more problematic is that, up until a couple of third-act shifts, the movie depicts all of its heroines as really, really good, and all of its villains as very, very bad.


Spencer plays Minny and she practically steals the show with crisp dialogue and an arsenal of explosive facial expressions.


"She's the best cook in Jackson and therefore sought after for her cooking prowess," Spencer tells NPR's Michele Norris. "But she is also obstinate and very opinionated and doesn't have a problem expressing those opinions, especially to white people, which was a no-no during that time period."


When taking on racist white women in the town, Spencer's Minny stands erect — in a way that reveals pride, but also a good deal of pain. "She is always standing tall," Spencer explains, to communicate: "You are not superior to me."


Minny is a tough soul on the outside, but her weaknesses show in her home, where she is an abused wife and an overworked mother of five. When she sends her teenage daughter off to work in the home of a white woman for the first time, she is crushed.


To prepare herself for the role, Spencer spoke to someone who endured the brutality and violence of 1960s Mississippi.


"I did a lot of research about the time period and spent some wonderful hours talking to Mrs. Myrlie Evers-Williams," Spencer says. Evers-Williams is the widow of civil rights activist Medgar Evers who, in 1963, was gunned down in front of his Jackson home.


Though The Help is set during the civil rights era, Spencer insists it is not a civil rights movie. "To me, it's more a movie about relationships, how these white women relate with each other and then how they relate to the women ... who work in their homes," she says.


The audience no doubt feels discomfort, but that's appropriate, "because people lived this discomfort," Spencer says: We owe it to these women to step inside their world for two hours.


The Help has generated a lot of buzz since its release — and not all of it has been positive. Some people are discouraging others from seeing the film, not wanting to view history through this particular lens. Spencer doesn't buy it.


"If it's that they don't like the fact that a white woman wrote [the book] and used an African-American dialect, I take issue with that, because what message are we sending to artists?" Spencer says. "If it's that black women are playing maids in 2011? I would say, these are not the same maids you saw in every other film about this era. For the first time, these women have a voice and these women are proactive in bringing about change in their community."


The important thing, Spencer says, is to make your own judgment whether you want to see the film.