Is "The Help" Sanitizing Segregation?

img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-101002" title="the help" src="/files/wxrimport/2011-08/the-help.jpg" alt="" width="440" height="297" /><

Does the light and frothy "chick lit" movie adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's bestselling novel, The Help sanitize the reality of segregation? The Help tells the story of several upper-class Southern white families in the early 1960s, from the amused and bemused perspective of their black housekeepers and cooks -- as told to a perky white female journalist.

In honor of The Help's midweek opening, Oprah Winfrey announced on her Twitter:

"Hey Tweeps -- if you liked the book The Help, you'll delight in the movie!  Opens today.  Can't wait to hear what you think."

Oprah did indeed like the book -- she picked it as the feature in her "O" Magazine and for Oprah's Book Club, and made it into a bestseller.

But The Help's sentimentalized portrait of the pre-Civil Rights South has other prominent African-American intellectuals and critics in an uproar. In an interview on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, Melissa Harris-Perry called the film "The Real Housewives of Jackson, Mississippi" -- and while she praised Oscar-nominee and Tony-winner Viola Davis' performance, she said the film only made her wish that in 2011, an A-list actress like Davis still wasn't reduced to playing a maid.

A fair-use sample of Harris-Perry's twitter-criticisms of the film include: "Hard to tell whether it's the representations of black women or of white women that's most horrible" and "Thank God magical black women were available to teach white women how to raise their families and to write books!"

Perry's final verdict on the film:  "The Help reduces sexism, systematic violent racism, and labor exploitation to a catfight that can be won by cunning and spunk."

A similar controversy erupted last fall when Tyler Perry adapted Ntozake Shange's legendary African-American feminist theater piece For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Oprah, who was reported to have been initially skeptical that Perry was the right one to direct the material, promoted the finished product, as did many top film critics of all colors.  However, many African Americans (and not a few white critics) recoiled at a play widely known as the most avant-garde and "important work about black female identity ever" entrusted to the hands of Madea.  The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt disemboweled the film, calling it a "hackneyed...train wreck" full of "sick cartoons."

Whether this latest controversy helps or hurts The Help at the box office and in its appeal to target demographics is yet to be seen.