The Help

There’s no mistaking The Help as anything but a period piece, and not just because of the 50-year-old displays of fashion, cars or decor.

Still, don’t expect many endorsements from Mississippi tourism officials or chambers of commerce on behalf of this civil-rights drama that exposes an ugly side of the not-to-distant past in the Deep South.

The film is adapted from the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, which was based in part on the author’s experiences as a white child essentially being raised by a black housekeeper in lieu of her absentee parents during the 1960s.

Such practices, the film argues, were common among affluent households in Mississippi during the height of the civil-rights movement that forms the backdrop for the film.

Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) are friends who hide an inner resentment for their jobs as underpaid and unreasonably scrutinized housekeepers for white families who are less advanced in race relations. Despite such treatment, they work out of a desperate need to raise their families.

Skeeter (Emma Stone) is an aspiring white journalist whose family housekeeper was fired under mysterious circumstances. Seeing an opportunity for a literary breakthrough, she befriends Aibileen and Minny for an anonymous novel that seeks to honor the women for their work, while simultaneously denouncing her ungrateful neighbors. Skeeter becomes moved and inspired by their personal stories, which are told with the risk that they might be exposed.

Director Tate Taylor’s script is loaded with good intentions and crowd-pleasing slickness, but it lacks subtlety, even if the goal is clearly to pay tribute to the housekeepers more than it is to condemn their employers, who might have been a product of their times and traditions.

The fine ensemble cast is led by Davis and Spencer as the most outspoken of the housekeepers, and Allison Janney as Skeeter’s ill mother who harbors secrets from the past. Stone (also on screen currently in Friends with Benefits and Crazy Stupid Love) is a rising star who continues to showcase her versatility.

There’s a level of camaraderie on both sides of the camera. Taylor and Stockett are longtime friends with similarities in their upbringings, and the director is also buddies from his acting days with Spencer, whose performance here makes her a talent to watch.

The Help shines the spotlight on a worthwhile historical topic, but the real-life housekeepers that endured such hardships deserve better than this watered-down treatment that turns formulaic and rambling.

Rated PG-13, 146 minutes.