A, dare we say, entertaining look at 1960s racial divide

"The Help," the movie version of the phenomenally successful novel about Southern women in 1962, is surprisingly compassionate and entertaining.

Why surprising?

Because if you had not read the book nor yet seen the movie, you would most likely expect any treatment of black maids and white matrons in the Jackson, Miss., of 1962 to emerge as a diatribe of racial prejudice, guilt and anger.

The American South, even in a time in which television screens and shopping malls make everyone look and sound alike, remains the most changing and adaptable region - surely in America and perhaps in the world. It falls. It rises. It perseveres.

Call it prideful guilt - an attempt to maintain heritage while, at the same time, denouncing it.

There is some prideful guilt in "The Help." The Hollywood odyssey that began with the anti-black prejudice of "Birth of a Nation" gave way to Margaret Mitchell's fantasy of faded glory and to Tennessee Williams' laughable, but poetic, decadence. Currently, it has evolved into a Hollywood that plays it safe commercially by staying in an angry mood. The slave ship horrors of an "Amistad" are safer than the humanity of a "To Kill a Mockingbird."

It is safe, then, to reason that the movie version of "The Help," in its first weekend at theaters everywhere, is a surprise in that it is more compassionate than it is angry. This is both its plus and its minus. While it is likely to become "beloved" with some viewers, it is just as likely to be quickly forgotten by others. For both, it is an entertainment worth seeing.

The movie, as with the book, has faced derision because of what some claim as its "exaggerated" speech patterns for the black characters and for the fact that it attempts to speak for black women of the period through a white, modern woman. Like "Mississippi Burning" (FBI agents as heroes of the civil rights movement) it is initiated by a white character.

Skeeter Phelan (played by new star Emma Stone, who gets better each time out) returns from Ole' Miss with a degree in English rather than the "Mrs." degree her mother would have preferred. She is more of a free thinker and an individual than the other members of the Junior League - all of whom are safely married to "community types."

She wearies of her job as an advice columnist at the local paper and seeks out local maids to share stories of their lives - stories that include humiliation and servitude. The ensuing book, we are told, is shocking, yet we see and hear little other than the obvious. It seems that its telling is more "shocking" than anything it actually tells.

Of course, criticism of author Kathryn Stockett for being white and writing her book is ludicrous. It's a novel. What novelist does not put himself, or herself, in the place of the characters?

The paranoia about literal versus imaginative identity among writers and filmmakers has extended, most famously, to even the mighty Steven Spielberg, who was denounced for making "The Color Purple." It is an even better film now than when it was released in 1985. In the midst of the controversy, the film received 13 Academy Award nominations but didn't win a single Oscar. It could not have been a coincidence that Spielberg was not even nominated. It cannot be a coincidence, either, that Spike Lee's campaign to wrest the direction of "Malcolm X" away from respected veteran Norman Jewison was successful. ("Malcolm X" lost a fortune at the box office and put Lee's directing career into a downward spiral.) Direction, like casting, should be color blind.

"The Help" may survive a similar color-minded controversy because it is... (the magic E word) entertaining. It touches human foibles in ways that are more folksy than political. The murder of Medgar Evers in Jackson is acknowledged but kept at a distance.

One cannot help but think that if the Hollywood studio system had taken over adapting this book, it would be a more "serious" and harrowing experience. Tate Taylor, who both directed and wrote the screenplay, was a childhood friend of the author back in Mississippi. His treatment for "The Help" makes it less "important" but more commercial.

This is not a total sellout, however, because as actress Viola Davis said in an interview, "No one will care whether I'm any good in the movie or not unless it's seen."

The cast is universally excellent in a way that may make individual Oscar nominations difficult to pick but should make it a leader in the Screen Actors Guild "ensemble cast" honors. Davis, who was an Oscar candidate for "Doubt" and has won two Broadway Tonys, has the film's most difficult role as Aibileen, a black woman who has raised 17 white children as if they were her own. She has the love of each of those children. Not just admiration or "like." Love. There are those of us who grew up with women like her in our homes, and we know the truth of the film and the book. We saw them as very much a part of the family.

Octavia Spencer has the showier part of Minny, the maid who can't hold a job because she has one of the biggest mouths in town. She talks back and she's proud of it. She also pays for it.

The closest thing to an outright villain is Hilly Holbrook, played by Bryce Dallas Howard (the daughter of director Ron Howard who has not become the instant sensation originally thought but has settled in for the long run). Hilly is the local social ruler who uses the Junior League like her own club. She is obsessed with passing a law that would make separate toilets a necessity for every home with "colored help." Even in the midst of a hurricane, she sends Minny to use the outside toilet.

Jessica Chastain, who was so otherworldly in "The Tree of Life," lends verve as the lively, but unaccepted blond wife who is closer to Marilyn Monroe than to Mrs. Robert E. Lee. The Junior League rejects her. She and Minny become supporters of each other - an outcast white woman and an outcast black woman.

Sissy Spacek, seen much too seldom nowadays, is the feisty matron who knows the score and sees the relationships for what they are.

Mary Steenburgen, an Oscar winner for "Melvin and Howard," has a bit as a New York book editor.

Put all these women together and you're closer to "Steel Magnolias" than to a protest line. Actually, "The Secret Life of Bees" (2008) was a much better movie, but its book sales were not comparable.

"The Help" may deal with the obvious, but it is a kind of obviousness we don't often see at the movies. In a world that is so filled with hate, it is a pleasure to see that love can grow from this, or any, social situation. While it misses a chance to be great, "The Help" is highly entertaining in a vaguely disturbing way.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com