The Help

Review by Pamela Zoslov

The movie version of Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel, The Help, eliminates one of the book’s main problems: Stockett’s inartful and controversial use of dialect in writing the first-person narratives of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. The book, to some readers’ dismay, is rife with “Law have mercys” and “Don’t you go sassing this white lady like you done the other.” Unless you are William Faulkner or Truman Capote or Flannery O’Connor, Southern black dialect is probably a thing you should avoid.

The movie, adapted and directed by Tate Taylor, places the dialogue in the mouths of some fine actresses, and the effect is much more natural than Stockett’s clunky prose on the page. The film gets more directly to the heart of the story, which is about the uncomfortable and often dangerous pre-civil rights relations between the races, focusing especially on the black women who cook, clean and raise the children of white women who treat them like chattel -- and sometimes like disease-carrying aliens.