A ★½ review of The Help (2011)

Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer do fine work with material that treats them very badly. The white protagonist is quite a choice. The quasi redemption arc for her mother is quite a choice. A novel about the Black experience written by a white writer who took the stories of Black voices for herself to craft her bestseller; a novel which is adapted into a movie about a self-insert white writer who takes these stories of Black voices, not for a fictional narrative, but as a historical document, and does it so selflessly that it defeats the One Really Racist Person