Lots of movies divide audiences (you liked it, I hated it, and the world goes round). But a liberal message movie about race has the power to divide audiences — and critics — in a special way. The people who respond to it are likely to feel moved, uplifted, morally transported, emotionally activated. Others may feel not so much that they don’t respond but that they’re reacting against what they’re seeing — a “hard-hitting” mass-audience truth that is actually a feel-good lie. Over the years, I have often found myself on the latter side of that divide, excoriating movies that passed off complacency as racially enlightened boldness. In the 1980s, there was a spate of films about the moral obscenity of life in South Africa that insisted on hanging their dramas on the shoulders of white protagonists — and that, as I usually took pains to point out, was wrong. (Why did a movie like Cry Freedom, featuring Denzel Washington as the slain anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, need to have a crusading white journalist played by Kevin Kline as its hero? Answer: It didn’t.) More recently, I was shocked that art-house audiences could have fallen for the finger-pointing sanctimony of Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (1996) — a movie that basically pulled the same ploy as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), springing a (saintly) black visitor on a racially insensitive household in order to get viewers to shed a tear of sympathy and, at the same time, to flex a muscle of moral superiority. It’s no surprise, really, that The Help, the adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel that opened big out of the starting gate, has, in some quarters, been socked with that kind of criticism. On paper, at least, The Help sounds exactly like the kind of well-meaning but backward, “progressive” yet pious movie that Hollywood, by now, should perhaps have outgrown. It’s set in the early civil