Nearly two consecutive years on the best seller list and five million copies later, Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help” experienced another boost when Tate Taylor’s adaptation opened a few weeks ago to relatively positive reviews. It’s easy to see why: Taylor’s carefully balanced mix of comedy and drama is even more fine tuned that Stockett’s and partnered with great performances, it’s an easily digestible bit of entertainment with heart and even a little insight into a difficult time in American history.

And here’s where things get tricky. Is it too soft? I don’t think it is and more than that, I don’t think it matters. One of the things I appreciated about the novel is that it’s an entertaining read that also sheds a little light into a dark period of history. There was never a sense that Stockett was out to change our perception of events of the past but in the prologue, she makes it quite clear that she wrote this story as a way of dealing with her own experience being raised by a black woman.

Flipping the last few pages of the novel, I was struck by the realization that this story took place 50 years ago and that my mother could easily have been one of the children raised by the help. It seems obvious but I was drawn so far into Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny’s lives that I didn’t stop to think about the situation until I’d closed the book. The film sits squarely on the same patch of land. Taylor, a longtime friend of Stockett’s, delivers an emotional and funny drama that doesn’t set out to change the world, only to entertain smartly. And that it does well.

Emma Stone is Skeeter, a recent graduate of Ole Miss and the only one of her friends not to drop out to start a family; an important note as this marks her as outsider even though she grew up and has remained friends with many of the young society women in town. She returns home to start her life, one she hopes is full of writing and adventure instead, she finds herself writing a cleaning column for the local paper and feeling embarrassed by her friends’ traditional way of thinking. The rest of the country is slowly turning to change but in the bridge and society circles, led by the horrifying Hilly Holbrook, the help still can’t share a bathroom with their employers though they’re perfectly happy to let these women into their homes six days a week to care for their children. Naïve, Skeeter assumes that the help will jump at the opportunity to talk to her about their experiences. She fails to see the danger this could have for the women but once Aibileen (the great Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) get on board, it’s only a matter of time before others follow suit.

Even at two and a half hours, the movie isn’t long enough to cover all of the stories the book manages to squeeze in but Taylor has a great understanding of the material and his adaptation takes the best and leaves behind the worst of Stockett’s story. Largely gone is the dialect the author chose to write the help’s stories instead replaced by casual speech, also largely ignored is Celia Foote’s tragic life outside town. Taylor’s take on the character makes for a less mysterious but stronger woman who needed a friend more than she needed a maid. I always loved Foote’s character and Jessica Chastain is wonderful.

We often, though not nearly enough, talk about the lack of strong female roles in Hollywood but here is a movie that features an entire slew of them. Stone, Davis and Spencer deserve much credit for their great performances but so do Bryce Dallas Howard who delivers a great performance as the all mighty Hilly, Allison Janney who has a wonderful scene in which she fires her maid in front of a group of society ladies, Cicely Tyson whose quiet performance as said maid is heartbreaking and Sissy Spacek who is gloriously brilliant as Hilly’s mother. All wonderful and worthy of attention.

The Help’s major flaw is that it keeps the civil rights events which are unfolding elsewhere in the country at arms length and for the most part relegated to television and newspapers. The closest we come to the violence is Aibileen running home, scared senseless, when she hears of a young man being shot; the scene is beautifully captured and there is a real sense of fear as Aibileen makes her way through the neighbourhood to Minny’s house and perhaps it’s because the scene works so well that I noticed the lack of others.

As Laila Lacy notes in her notes at Multicultural Familia, The Help does feel like a “pasteurized and homogenized” version of civil rights, one that is built more to entertain than to make any poignant observations on civil rights era Mississippi.

Though it may not work as a poignant look at civil rights, there are other, far better films on the subject, I found the film extremely successful in its observations of female relationships; mother daughter relationships and the love/hate we sometimes feel, the friendships which get us through the hard times (in this case wonderfully portrayed by both Aibileen and Minny’s friendship but also by that of Minny and Celia), the sacrifices that women make for their children, how women interact with each other in groups and even the relationship between women and their bodies.

Though I can appreciate the criticisms and they should be noted, The Help is the type of entertainment I love, the kind that makes me laugh, cry and ultimately sparks conversation.