The Help

The movie is richly flavored by the work of a sprawling cast that puts the exceptional Viola Davis and Emma Stone at the film's impassioned center, with the scene-stealing tang of Octavia Spencer and the sweet-tart of Jessica Chastain thankfully never far away.

Since we generally prefer not to be reminded of the darker chapters of our history, it's a risky business taking us back — even with a fictional tale — to Jackson, Miss., at a time when African Americans were still very much the serving class. As much a part of white family life as weekly bridge clubs and church on Sunday, black maids were often loved, more often exploited and nearly always taken for granted. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers were out there stirring things up in that season of fear, but in Jackson kitchens, things were being kept at a simmer.

Against that backdrop, "The Help" takes us inside an unlikely rebellion. It all begins when new Ole Miss grad Skeeter (Stone) comes back home and tries to persuade the women who cook and clean and raise the babies to tell their stories and secrets. She has a publishing career on her mind; they have uncomfortable truths, and redemption on theirs. For both sides it becomes a test of courage and conviction told in a kind of Capra-esque style, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Kathryn Stockett's bestselling novel has given writer-director Tate Taylor a lot to chew on. Born and raised in Jackson, they are longtime friends and you can feel that connection in the care with which Taylor approaches the material, though the reverence is exactly what eventually trips him up. As a result, the movie exists within an emotionally charged landscape sometimes too starkly black and white — there is no room for ambiguity at this table.

With Taylor's deep Southern roots, he insisted on shooting the film on location, ultimately finding the retro feel he was looking for in Greenwood, Miss. Cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, whose keen sense of the South earned him an Oscar nomination for 1991's "The Prince of Tides," makes the most of it, giving even the dirt roads and decaying frame houses a kind of gauzy beauty usually reserved for the plantation-styled manses. Production designer Mark Ricker ("Julie & Julia") matches him in kind — this is a man who knows his way around kitchens, an asset since it is in kitchens that much of the movie takes place.

While a lot of the action happens over stoves, it's the toilets that become the moral proving ground — and deliver some of the movie's funniest moments. That "The Help" can take the incendiary issue of "separate-but-equal" bathrooms and spin it into a series of side-splitting gags without losing sight of the underlying pain of discrimination, represents a kind of comedy I thought Hollywood had forgotten how to do. You know, the kind that makes us laugh while going right to the heart of the matter, and comes as a blessed relief from the vapid raunch that has become the norm.