The Help

I don’t know what kind of racist craziness we expected her to express, but that wasn’t it. I was the lone black person in our group, which also included only one native Southerner, and as a confrontation brewed between this woman and the young people in her restaurant, I watched her defiance turn into something else. “Mammy is strong,’’ she kept saying. “Mammy raised me.’’ We saw a loaded insult. She saw an emblem of welcoming. We were mad. And our anger broke her heart.

This pretty much captures the cognitive dissonance of watching “The Help’’: One woman’s mammy is another’s man’s mother. What can you do? It’s possible both to like this movie - to let it crack you up, then make you cry - and to wonder why we need a broad, if sincere dramatic comedy about black maids in Jackson, Miss., in 1962 and ’63 and the high-strung white housewives they work for. The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time.

Ads mostly feature the white actors in various tizzies, using accents wide as a boulevard. It’s “Tin Magnolias.’’ Meanwhile, the heart of the film itself belongs to Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), the two very different maids and best friends at the center of the story. Aibileen is stoic. Minny is defiant. But the movie, like the extremely popular Kathryn Stockett novel it’s based on, uses the civil rights movement to suggest that the help could use some help. And so a young white woman named Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) finds herself writing a controversial book in the words of the maids who work in the homes of her girlfriends.