Viola Davis Said That She Regretted Starring in This Movie That Earned Her an Oscar Nomination

The Oscars have a notorious reputation for honoring sensitive or sometimes hard-hitting dramas that deal with black people’s marginalization in society. Best Winner pictures, ranging from Driving Miss Daisy to Green Book, earned their honors on the backs of unanimous praise by critics for being heartwarming tales about friendships that crossed racial barriers. In the middle of those Oscar years, however, Tate Taylor’s The Help featured a powerhouse performance by Viola Davis that the actress has reflected on with regret.

The nuances of resentment and black pride were traits that made Davis’s role as 1960s Southern home worker Aibileen Clark in The Help worthy of worldwide critical acclaim. David, alongside co-star Octavia Spencer, was recognized with an Academy Award nomination in 2012, with the latter star winning Best Supporting Actress. While Davis elevates Taylor’s period drama with a personal truth that breaks past standard-breaking color barrier tropes seen in movies featuring a white savior angle, the future Oscar winner of Fences, having second thoughts about accepting the Aibileen role in The Help, speaks to the larger inauthentic nature of a real-world issue told by a Caucasian filmmaker and writer.

'The Help' Makes Light of Southern Racism

Based on the 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett, The Help examines the lives of black housemaids working for the wealthy white establishment in 1963 Jackson, Mississippi. Davis’s Aibileen is employed by Elizabeth Leefolt (Ahna O’Reilly) and spends much of her job raising the socialite’s young daughter, Mae. Aibileen’s fellow housemaid friend, Minny Jackson (Spencer), works for Mrs. Walters (Sissy Spacek) and often faces disdain from her employer’s scheming daughter, Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard).

Between Aibileen having a maternal presence in Mae’s life, with the mother often absent, and Minny getting fired for breaking colored-only rules in the Walters household, there’s the housemaid’s aspiring writer friend Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone). Taking a job at a local paper, Skeeter initially writes a general housecleaning advice column only to shift perspective to the hardships that Aibileen and Minny have to endure daily. But upon learning of the surprise firing of Skeeter’s longtime housemaid, Constantine (Cicely Tyson), the writer gets motivated to write a book to share the housemaids’ stories from their perspectives.

When The Help hit theaters in 2011, critics took notice of how Taylor was able to tackle race relations with warmth, charm, and an uplifting message without ever getting truly dark. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers praised the film for its friendship themes, not only between Davis and Spencer but also with Davis and Stone, as the Bugonia star’s role shines a light on the housemaids’ hardships. Though The Help is unique in showcasing Southern white women who can be just as viciously biased by race as men, it also makes characters like Stone’s Skeeter appear to represent those non-racists who pat themselves on the back for taking a stand. In 2020, following the tragic murder of George Floyd, Howard spoke out on Facebook by expressing a sense of guilt for appearing in The Help. Even with a positive experience making the film, she believes “that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie”. Howard’s comments raise an honest issue in spite of novelist Stockett and writer/director Taylor’s best intentions with the subject matter: The Help rarely lets Aibileen and Minny speak their truth about being black in America without a helping white hand.

Viola Davis Believes 'The Help' Does Not Move White Audiences About The Black Experience

For a movie that tries hard to have its white protagonist expose the injustices that black maids endure, Davis shares in Howard’s views that telling the story from Stone’s perspective only gives the white audience a false sense of comfort. The star of G20 told Vanity Fair in 2020, “The white audience at the most can sit and get an academic lesson on how we are. Then they leave the movie theater, and they talk about what it meant. They're not moved by who we were.” The Help certainly shines in the lighter moments for audience satisfaction, whether it's Minny serving a feces-laced pie to Hilly after being fired or the heartbreaking scene when Aibileen leaves Mae while pleading for Elizabeth to be a present mother in her daughter’s life. Yet, few of these moments feel authentic because Taylor presents them as glossy Hollywood Oscar-bait depictions along the same lines as Daisy, Green Book, and Spencer’s Hidden Figures, all of which were made by white male filmmakers. If the story were to be made to cross the audience color barrier effectively to give true empathy to the characters, The Help would have been better served in the hands of a black female filmmaker like Ava DuVernay or Gina Prince-Bythewood to understand the housemaids’ rich history inside and out.

The Help rarely allows the characters played by Davis and Spencer a chance to truly stand on their own and speak without the need for a white voice to cross the barriers to get the truth of their struggles out to the masses. The representation is not always about highlighting social injustice, but the perspective to create true empathy for the audience to deeply understand the black experience.

The Help is available to stream on Tubi in the US.

Release Date August 10, 2011

Runtime 146minutes