Review: "The Help" (2011)

Kathryn Sockett's hugely popular, two-years-running, can't-escape-it bestseller The Help, centered around African American maids working in Jackson, Mississippi at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960's, has finally seen its way to the big screen in the form of Tate Taylor's friendly, weepy adaptation. 
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At an elongated 146 minutes, The Help is a surprisingly brisk affair with its catty, contentious community gossiping, that is until it becomes a rudimentary race-relations drama and a four-hankie weeper, at that. So while the film goes down relatively easy (aside from those queasy, threatening upheavals), I do believe it is stuck somewhere between a soggy, inspirational civil rights drama and a cartoon.
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Emma Stone plays Skeeter, a bookish, frizzy (but more importantly, white) Ole Miss grad who yearns to write something substantial, something "she believes in". Enter Aibileen Clark, a weary, dogged African American maid played by the great Viola Davis, and Skeeter's increasingly racist bridge partner neighbors (led by a viciously snooty Bryce Dallas Howard as Miss Hilly Holbrook) and you have your socially relevant civil rights angle and a journalistic exposé ripe for the dramatic picking. 
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Aibileen and Skeeter meet regularly to covertly assemble the piece that will inevitably make up Skeeter's novel, "The Help", but she also persuades the opinionated, fiery Minny Jackson (played by Octavio Spencer, who's simply a hoot) to step out and tell her story as she concurrently works for the wealthy, inadequate social outcast, Celia Foote, who's given a ditzy buoyancy by Jessica Chastain in some of the film's better moments. 
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Landmark civil rights moments (like the shooting of activist Medgar Evers) provide the backdrop for the era and the urgency for the 'help' as they continue to struggle with their daily lives. Meanwhile, Skeeter and her slowly congealing novel rather curiously overwhelm the proceedings with a tedious mother-daughter relationship and a listless romance with a Senator's son. 
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In the end, the film takes the novel's many loose strands of varying intrigue and rather clumsily attempts to tie them all up in a blitzkrieg of gushy, lachrymose confrontations. Perhaps the only conclusion lacking in all of this over-sweetened mush is that of Aibileen, whose given such a grieving, wounded aura of sympathy by Viola Davis that she can cause the viewer to well-up with just a wistful glance at a still photograph. She's the only truly extraordinary asset of this otherwise bright, cheery and terribly cloying film. [C]