Today is one of those rare occasions when I feel it would help to reprise a previous commentary in its entirety. It’s short. I will append an update below.
So, first, here is “Viola Regrets Portrayal of Black Women in The Help” from September 17, 2018.
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The Help was a box-office hit. It also won critical acclaim. This included Octavia Spencer winning an Academy Award (an Oscar) for Best Supporting Actress and the film winning a slew of other Academy Award nominations, namely Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress for Jessica Chastain, and Best Actress for Viola Davis (evidently everybody upstaged the other lead actress, Emma Stone, who was not even nominated).
But I was in the vanguard of those who criticized its white-savior narrative. Here in part is how I pooh-poohed its acclaim back then in “‘The Help’,” September 7, 2011:
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Am I the only one who finds it discouraging that the most celebrated relationships between black and white women in film are those which feature the former working as a domestic servant for the latter?
Here we are, 72 years since Gone with the Wind first celebrated this hardly ‘ennobling’ relationship; yet people (mostly misguided, guilt-ridden white women) are flocking to the cinema to see it play out again. …
I urge all of you who are reveling in the ante-bellum female bonding The Help depicts to reconsider how truly worthy this film is of the social praise and financial rewards you are heaping upon it.
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That is why I welcome this belated recognition and admission:
Viola Davis revealed that she has some regrets about one of her Oscar-nominated roles. …
What does weigh on her conscience, she said, is her role in The Help, which has been criticized for over-crediting white women for improvements in race relations, instead of placing more emphasis on the real heroes of the story, black maids like Davis’ character Aibileen. …
‘I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard,’ she said.
(The New York Post, September 12, 2018)
Of course, it’s notable that this is coming from Davis, not Spencer. Because I am cynical enough to wonder if Davis would be making it if she too had snagged an Oscar for portraying her stereotypical mammie.
To be fair, though, both actresses redeemed their careers in subsequent films: Spencer with her Oscar-nominated performance in Hidden Figures (2017); and Davis with her Oscar-winning performance in Fences (2017).
That’s a wrap!
Related commentaries:
The Help…
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Update
Evidently, that role is haunting her. Because here is how Viola doubled down on her regret during a cover interview for the July/August 2020 issue of Vanity Fair:
‘There’s no one who’s not entertained by The Help. But there’s a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself, and my people, because I was in a movie that wasn’t ready to [tell the whole truth],’ Davis says. The Help, like so many other movies, was ‘created in the filter and the cesspool of systemic racism.’
Clearly it would be unfair to say it took the killing of George Floyd for Viola to have this awakening. But that tragedy has clearly opened her eyes to the myriad ways her profession reinforces the systemic racism The Help portrayed as anachronistic.
So here’s to living your life of protest, Viola.
Voila!
Related commentaries:
Viola regrets…
George Floyd protest thread…
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