“The Help” comes to us with some controversy as it is based on a 2009 best seller by Kathryn Stockett, a white woman who wrote about African American maids’ experience working in the houses of white people. Many would have preferred to have a black man or woman write this story, but it’s important to note that Stockett herself was raised by a black maid who instilled her with a strong confidence that is unwavering, and this was all in lieu of her absentee mother. Plus, Stockett (as represented by the character of Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan) captured the voices of these ill-treated black women with piercing honesty and made herself a vessel for their voices to be heard. From the start, she made clear this book was about them and not her.

The movie version comes to us wrapped in a bow with beautiful colors and an appealing movie poster. I kept think of Rob Reiner’s “Ghosts of Mississippi” which blew the opportunity to make audiences aware of who Medgar Evers was at the expense of some truly bland while characters, and that’s even though Alec Baldwin was playing one of them (James Woods fared much better). “The Help” looked like it would make the same mistakes, but thankfully it doesn’t. Whatever flaws it has, it is a deeply felt motion picture that revisits a painful part of American history that people have either forgotten or are sick of revisiting.

At its center is Skeeter (Emma Stone), a recent college graduate who gets a job writing a housekeeping column for the local paper in Jackson, Mississippi. After reuniting with good friends in her hometown, she finds herself perturbed by the senseless racism that has divided the blacks and whites in an almost unspoken way. Skeeter also becomes concerned as to the whereabouts of the maid who raised her, Constantine, as she has vanished without an explanation. These events compel her to start writing a book of the travails black housekeepers go through, and she is determined to capture their pride, heartache, and deep seated anger resulting from their thoughtless mistreatment.

This could have easily been a manipulative motion picture filled with cloying emotions, but the filmmakers have given us a variety of characters (black and white) that are complex and never come across as caricatures. Each one has their own needs and desires which conflict with those of others, and after awhile it becomes clear that it’s not always about race.

The black maid Skeeter leans on the most is Aibileen Clark, played in a powerhouse of a performance by Viola Davis. She is done memorable work in films like “Doubt” and “Knight and Day,” and she inhabits this character with a pride that while wounded remains defiantly strong. While her voice projects a kindness and understanding on top of an obedience to her employers, Clark’s face and eyes betray a deep seated resentment that has long since reached its boiling point.

The next black maid who contributes to Skeeter’s book is Minny Jackson, played in another great performance by Octavia Spencer. She’s the most outspoken of the bunch which results in her getting fired quite often, and yet she is reluctant at first to talk with Skeeter about her experiences. We later see Jackson getting her revenge in a way that somehow feels inspired by episodes of MTV’s “Punk’d” or “Jackass.” Spencer gives “The Help” a great sense of humor it might have otherwise not have had, and she is every bit Davis’ match.

Jackson also develops a highly unusual relationship with the hopelessly naïve Celia Foote. Unlike other working relationships, Jackson gets the opportunity to be blunt with Foote and tells her what she needs to hear. I found the friendship between them to be one of “The Help’s” most welcome surprises. Jessica Chastain brilliantly inhabits Celia Foote, and with this and “The Tree of Life,” she is having one hell of a summer!

Aside from “Superbad,” I’ve not seen Emma Stone in many other movies (I’ve been meaning to see “Easy A”). But she is a revelation here and holds her own against a large number of acting stalwarts. Stone imbues Skeeter with a hard won independence that never easily wavers. I love how even in her eyes you can see Stone’s determination of proving how strong a woman Skeeter and of the sincere goodness in her heart. If she has not proven herself as a dramatic actress before this, she certainly has now.

Now the majority of the white characters in “The Help” could have all been one-dimensional idiots, and while several of them make assumptions that are as ridiculous as they are racist, we see other sides of their personalities as well. One white character who can be seen as the movie’s chief villain is the snobby Hilly Holbrook, played in a truly gutsy performance by Bryce Dallas Howard. Her superiority against the black maids turns out to be driven more by fear than anything else, and realizing this at the film’s end gives Hilly a dimension we weren’t sure she had in the first place.

Howard has done phenomenal work over the years, and she was a good reason to actually see some of M. Night Shyamalan’s movies like “The Village” and “Lady In The Water” (the latter being a tremendous flop).

Other great performances in “The Help” come from Allison Janney as Skeeter’s mother Charlotte who goes from being a stubborn mother desperate for her daughter to get a man to someone who regrets the decisions she’s made in her life. Sissy Spacek is a hoot throughout as Hilly’s mother Mrs. Walters who delights in her daughter’s misfortunes as her dad spoiled her rotten. One underrated performance comes from Chris Lowell who plays Skeeter’s eventual boyfriend Stuart. He starts off as an arrogant young man who thinks he has women all figured out but later comes to his senses.

“The Help” isn’t perfect and does get a bit too cute at times, but its emotions ring true thanks to the acting and the direction by Tate Taylor (a long time friend of Stockett’s). It skirts the conventional narrative to give us something more authentic that is not (if you’ll excuse the expression) white-washed like so many other Hollywood movies. It covers a subject that in the end does need to be revisited, and it says a lot about the movie that it jumped from no. 2 to no. 1 in its second week of release.

* * * ½ out of * * * *

 He and his older brother Charles first worked for the NAACP to help organize local affiliations, he then applied, but his application to the University of Mississippi Law school was denied, this drew attention to the NAACP and they made him the State Field secretary for the state of Mississippi. Evers activism made him one of the most well-known activists in the state. On June 12 1963, Evers was shot by a sniper on his way home; he died in a nearby hospital around 1:30 p.m. that same day.

On July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, Medgar Evers became one of the four children of James and Jessie Evers. During Medgar’s childhood, his parents showered him with love and joy even though his father worked in a sawmill and his mother was a laundress. Because of this, the family didn’t make much profit, but nevertheless, his family was strict about education, religion, and hard work.

During Medgar Evers’ childhood, he witnessed many tragic things that would leave him scarred for life and would cause him to rebel in the future. At only the age of fourteen, Medgar witnessed a horrible and tragic event. A friend of Medgar’s father, Tingle, was dragged behind a wagon through the streets of Decatur. He was later shot and hanged in accusation of insulting a White woman. Everyday that Medgar would go to his under-funded school, he would pass by the tree from which Tingle was hanged, and he would recall the bloody clothes and the tragic death of his father’s friend. He would never forget it.

At the age of seventeen in 1942, Medgar volunteered and was inducted into the United States Army where he fought in World War II. He was assigned to a segregated port battalion, which was normal at the time, but this only maddened him. Once he made it home safely from the war, he wanted to vote against the segregated battalions. So, in the summer of 1946, Medgar, his brother Charles, and many other Black veterans registered to vote at the Decatur city hall. But when Election Day came around, Medgar and the other veterans were forced away at gunpoint from casting their ballots by a mob of angry White people. This angered Medgar even more and this was when his tension snapped. This is the key event that finally sparked his rebellion.

Back in Medgar Evers’ time, Black people and White people weren’t allowed to be “separate but equal” in the south. Medgar Evers did not support segregation, and did many things to oppose it by helping the Civil Rights Movement. He participated in many boycotts, desegregated the University of Mississippi, and even became the first NAACP (National Association of the Advancement of Colored People) field officer in Mississippi. Along with all of the things listed above, Medgar also helped with the public investigations of Emmett Till, a young Black boy that was kidnapped and murdered after being accused of “flirting” with the wife of a White grocery shop owner named Roy Bryant, by disguising himself as a cotton picker, to see if he could gather some information on where Emmett Till might have been after he had gone missing. All of these things made Medgar very popular in the quest for equal rights between Black and White Americans, but it also made him a popular target for many segregationists.

Although Medgar Evers had catapulted Civil Rights Movement far, it had left him vulnerable to attack, and the day of the attack finally came on June 12, 1963. As Medgar came home from an integration meeting with the NAACP carrying T-shirts that had: “Jim Crow Must Go” sprawled across the front, a sniper’s bullet dug itself deep into Medgar’s back. He stumbled blindly about thirty feet until he finally collapsed. His wife, Myrlie, heard the high-powered rifle’s shot, and ran outside to find Medgar lying face-down in the carport, in a pool of blood. Medgar died soon after in the hospital due to the loss of blood and internal injuries.

After Medgar’s tragic death, a high-powered rifle, which was thought to have been the weapon that killed Medgar, was found in the thicket of some bushes approximately 150 feet from Medgar’s carport. The fingerprints on the rifle were still fresh and they were identified as those of Byron De La Beckwith, former member of the White Citizens’ Council and KKK (Ku Klux Klan). Beckwith was tried twice for Medgar’s murder in front of all-white male jurors but wasn’t found guilty. But when he was tried thirty years later in front of eight Blacks and four Whites, he was given a life sentence. He only served seven years though, before dying of a heart attack on January 21, 2001.

At Medgar’s funeral, about three hundred young mourners began singing and moving in a mass toward Capital Street, the main street of the capital city. The police reacted by using billy-clubs and dogs to disperse them, but the crowd responded by hurling bricks, bottles, and rocks. And this isn’t the only thing that happened after Medgar’s death. Many songs, statues, and monuments were made in his honor. Even a whole school was constructed in honor of him.

Even though Medgar Evers never got to finish his job, he had catapulted the Civil Rights Movement further than he thought he could. He might not know it, but even if his death seemed like the worst possible thing for the Civil Rights Movement then, it seems that it actually helped the Civil Rights Movement even more because more people had started to get involved as they were inspired by him during his short, but great life.