The Help" could be a lot more thorny than it is, but as a tale of bigotry and racial prejudice set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, its contours are surprisingly smooth. It doesn't have the high rage factor of, say, 1988's "Mississippi Burning," nor the intense, provocative drama of 1990's "The Long Walk Home" — both landmark films that deal with race and the civil rights movement. Instead, "The Help" is quite palatable, and whatever sarcasm or irony director/writer Tate Taylor may have intended are done up in metaphorical candy wrappers, much like the skirts worn by its privileged white women characters.
"The Help" does, however, throw around ideas and nuggets of wisdom designed to lead the viewer off on a process of pondering. Its very title suggests the film is more of an aid or a guideline to start thinking, rather than something that will come out with a magic solution to make everything OK.
Besides, nothing is really OK, either in the story or the current reality we're seeing some five decades after segregation laws in the southern United States were officially abolished. The median household income for the average white family in the U.S. is around 20 times that of a black family. In the movie, a black maid is asked why she chose her job, and she replies that her mother was a maid and her grandmother was a house slave. For her, it was a matter of course to be "the help" in a white household. Did she ever want to do anything else? Yes, but no one had ever asked her that question.