“With her deep voice, her gravity, and her gift for restrained sorrow and quiet moral authority, Davis often gets cast as responsible people — detectives, doctors, social workers, cops. Once she was a mayor; once she was the head of the CIA. Either she hasn’t been asked to play a maid very often, or she has declined those roles; before The Help, her one memorable stint as a housekeeper was in Todd Haynes’ brilliant Far From Heaven, in which she and Haynes seemed to collaborate on an onscreen deconstruction of the qualities of a 1950s film domestic. The Help was different: At 45, Davis was finally given the opportunity to play the lead in a studio movie. (Are we really still not going to talk about race, and how much sooner that opportunity might have come otherwise?) But it meant wearing that uniform and holding a little blonde white girl in her lap while saying, ‘You is kind. You is smart. You is important.’

I don’t know what it cost Davis emotionally to go there for her first high-stakes starring role, or what argument, if any, she had with herself beforehand. I’ve talked to tough, smart black actresses who say that a great part is a great part, and other equally tough, smart black actresses who simply, categorically, do not want to play maids or slaves, just as I’ve met Arab-American actors who felt they had to turn down the golden opportunity to be killed by Kiefer Sutherland on 24. You don’t get to call them prima donnas unless you yourself have spent years facing the hard knowledge that regardless of your talent and training, a huge percentage of what you’re going to get offered is the chance to play an ethnic cliché. Yes, Hattie McDaniel elevated a caricature by dint of sheer talent. It was 72 years ago. In 2012, we should be further than we are past the sentimentality of Mammy’s ‘I done raise that chile from a baby.’ The Help’s racial politics aren’t Gone With the Wind’s, but, as I wrote when the movie opened, it’s far too comfortable trafficking in cliches about super-maternal black women whose compassion and capacity to nurture always trumps their anger.”