The Help

Aibileen Clark is a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children and has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson is an African-American maid who has often offended her employers despite her family's struggles with money and her desperate need for jobs; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a young white woman who has recently moved back home after graduating college to find out her childhood maid has mysteriously disappeared. These three stories intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around "the help"; yet they are always kept at a certain distance because of racial lines.

The Help lands as crowd-pleasing, old-fashioned melodrama that audiences embraced far more warmly than critics did. Viola Davis is the near-universal point of agreement — even detractors concede her performance elevates the material — while Octavia Spencer drew frequent praise for scene-stealing comic energy. The sharper dispute is whether the film softens and distorts its civil-rights setting to the point of dishonesty: Black women historians formally objected that it strips domestic workers' lives of historical accuracy, and several critics accused it of flattening history into feel-good Hollywood tropes, including the white-savior narrative.