Box office The Help earned $169,708,112 in North America and $52,094,074 in other territories for a worldwide total of $221,802,186. On its first weekend, the film grossed $26million, coming in second place behind
Rise of the Planet of the Apes. However, during its second weekend, the film jumped to first place with $20million, declining only 23 percent, the smallest drop among films playing nationwide. The film crossed the $100million mark on its 21st day of release, becoming one of only two titles in August 2011 that achieved this. On its fourth weekend (Labor Day three-day weekend), it became the first film since
Inception (2010), to top the box-office charts for three consecutive weekends. Its four-day weekend haul of $19.9million was the fourth largest for a Labor Day weekend.
The Help topped the box office for 25 days in a row. This was the longest uninterrupted streak since
The Sixth Sense (35 days), which was also a late summer release, in 1999. To promote the film,
TakePart hosted a series of three writing contests. Rebecca Lubin, of Mill Valley, California, who has been a nanny for nearly two decades won the recipe contest. Darcy Pattison's "11 Ways to Ruin a Photograph" won "The Help" Children's Story Contest with her story about a tenacious young girl who refuses to take a good photograph while her father is away "soldiering". After being chosen by guest judge and children's-book author
Lou Berger, the story was professionally illustrated. The final contest was about "someone who inspired you". Genoveva Islas-Hooker charmed guest judge Doc Hendley (founder of
Wine to Water) with her story, A Heroine Named Confidential. A case manager for patients with HIV, Islas-Hooker was consistently inspired by one special individual who never gave up the fight to live.
Critical response The Help received mostly positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator
Rotten Tomatoes reported that 75% of 231 professional critics gave the film a positive review, with an average score of 7.00/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Though arguably guilty of glossing over its racial themes,
The Help rises on the strength of its castparticularly
Viola Davis, whose performance is powerful enough to carry the film on its own."
Metacritic, a review aggregator which assigns a
weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gives the film a score of 62 based on 41 reviews Indicating generally favorable reviews.
CinemaScore polls reported that the average grade moviegoers gave the film was a rare "A+" on an A+ to F scale. Tom Long from
The Detroit News remarked about the film: "Appealling, entertaining, touching and perhaps even a bit healing,
The Help is an old-fashioned grand yarn of a film, the sort we rarely get these days." Connie Ogle of
Miami Herald gave the film three out of four stars and said it "will make you laugh, yes, but it can also break your heart. In the dog days of August moviegoing, that's a powerful recommendation." Many critics praised the performances of Davis and Spencer. Wilson Morales of Blackfilm.com gave the movie three out of four stars and commented, "With powerful performances given by Viola Davis and scene stealer Octavia Spencer, the film is an emotionally moving drama that remains highly entertaining."
David Edelstein of
New York magazine commented, "
The Help belongs to Viola Davis." A more mixed review from Karina Longworth of
The Village Voice said: "We get a fairly typical Hollywood flattening of history, with powerful villains and disenfranchised heroes." Rick Groen of
The Globe and Mail, giving the film two out of four stars, said: "Typically, this sort of film is an earnest tear-jerker with moments of levity. Instead, what we have here is a raucous rib-tickler with occasional pauses for a little dramatic relief." Referring to the film as a "big, ole slab of honey-glazed hokum",
The New York Times noted that "save for Ms. Davis's, however, the performances are almost all overly broad, sometimes excruciatingly so, characterized by loud laughs, bugging eyes and pumping limbs." Some of the negative reviews criticized the film for its inability to match the quality of the book. Chris Hewitt of the
St. Paul Pioneer Press said about the film: "Some adaptations find a fresh, cinematic way to convey a book's spirit but
The Help doesn't." Ida E. Jones, the national director of the
Association of Black Women Historians, released an open statement criticizing the film, stating "[d]espite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice,
The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers." The ABWH accused both the book and the film of insensitive portrayals of African-American vernacular, a nearly uniform depiction of black men as cruel or absent, and a failure to acknowledge the sexual harassment many black women endured in their white employers' homes. Jones concluded: "The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women's lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment." Roxane Gay of literary web magazine
The Rumpus argues the film might be offensive to African Americans, saying the film uses racial Hollywood
tropes like the
Magical Negro character. In 2014, the movie was one of several discussed by
Keli Goff in
The Daily Beast in an article concerning
white savior narratives in film.
Accolades At the
84th Academy Awards,
Octavia Spencer won the
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in this film. The film also received three other
Academy Award nominations:
Academy Award for Best Picture,
Academy Award for Best Actress for
Viola Davis, and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for
Jessica Chastain. ==Historical accuracy==