A&E

With her trademark ginger locks and deep, throaty voice, Emma Stone is a refreshing revelation on screen. Since her debut in the now comedy classic, “Superbad,” Stone has carved a bustling, fledgling career out of her ability to be both accessibly amusing and extraordinarily elegant. She’s the whole package. Seductive and sarcastic. Goofy and gorgeous. However, while her charismatic performances in both ‘Easy A’ and the recent “Crazy, Stupid, Love” have cemented Stone’s status as a talented comic actress, her turn in director Tate Taylor’s “The Help,” as a 1960s civil rights crusader is a pointed break towards more dramatic material. Sadly, it’s not as successful a shift for Stone as both her performance and the film emerge as unfortunately shallow.

Based on the popular novel by Kathryn Stockett, “The Help” revolves around the tenuous and increasingly tumultuous relationship between the African-American maids of Jackson, Mississippi and their sometimes cruel, sometimes kind white employers as documented by budding journalist Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone). From the down-to-earth Aibileen (Viola Davis) to the over-the-top Minny (Octavia Spencer), “The Help” weaves the multiple narratives of these African-American women’s lives as Skeeter collects them for eventual publication. And as if the struggles of black women in the ’60s south weren’t enough material, there’s also Skeeter’s personal strife (a mother with cancer, boy troubles) to contend with. It’s an ambitious undertaking, both for Skeeter the character and for Taylor’s film, but it’s one that fails to flesh out as intensely complex an issue as racial relations.

Take the character Hilly Holbrook, for instance. Played by Bryce Dallas Howard, she’s so cruel and domineering as Minny’s employer. With an inflexibility that rivals any dictator, she doesn’t even allow her maids to use the indoor toilets. But, while her actions are probably not uncommon of mid-century, upper class southern white women, the antics of Holbrook come across as more comical instead of grave. The same goes for Ms. Stone’s Skeeter Phelan who parades around the film as a martyr for these maid minorities with a fairly awful accent and very little to offer other than her barely convincing, wide-eyed sympathy. The characters, save Viola Davis’ triumphant turn, never fully develop as they meander in a film severely lacking in focus.

‘The Help,” like its protagonist Skeeter, has a crippling identity crisis. Tonally, it wavers between a light-hearted comedy with some Ya-Ya sisterhood charm and a somber expose of racial inequality. At times, the film is almost Marx Brothers-esque with Octavia Spencer’s Minny offering nothing more than sass and some particularly excellent excrement humor. But, despite some well-crafted humor, the comedy seems to undercut the weightier message of racial tension. And even though Spencer provides some gut-busting laughs, her finger-wavin’ attitude borders on caricature as the film derails into a piece-meal collection of haphazard plots and characters. Similarly, the technical aspects of the film are just as disorderly with distractingly abrupt scene cuts and schmaltzy, maudlin music to boot.

In a sea of mediocrity, even the effervescent Emma Stone can’t help ‘The Help’ (pardon the wordplay). Where there should be a deeply profound tale of tragedy and triumph, there is only a set of half-assed stories. Where there should be complex characters, there are only archetypes of racial categories — the sassy black woman, the racist white southerner and the socially conscious white journalist. They’re all there, but they’re all as incomplete as the film becomes. Even the premise of publication ends on an anti-climactic note with little satisfaction and too much sap. The sad state of the film should be its content, not its poor execution. But, despite some moments of real connection (particularly between Minny and Celia), the titular ‘help’ never get the attention they deserve.

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