The Help is to cinema what Michael Bublé is to pop music; it is both offensively bad and unconscionably charming. With a ratio of syrup to sanctimoniousness that falls somewhere between The Notebook and Erin Brockovich, every minute I watch is an exercise in emotional bingeing coupled with waning self-respect. Girls, file this one under ‘duvet day’.

We follow a Civil Rights era Bridget Jones (Emma Stone, of Superbad fame) as she wanders wide-eyed through a world of injustice, ultimately compelled to embark upon the writing of a novel in secret, publicising the ruthless subjugation of African-American maidservants who populate the middle-class neighbourhoods of her hometown in Mississippi. The film is not to be congratulated for its forward-thinking, having been pipped to the moral post by To Kill A Mockingbird around fifty years earlier, not to mention the examination of every possible inflection of racism in the intervening years. In fact, it seems that director Tate Taylor has found the only stone left unturned: the didactic chick-flick.

Emma Stone is never going set the world on fire (having been outclassed in Superbad by all but McLovin, things weren’t going well for her), but she does small-town crusader with admirable sincerity. Although she hasn’t a shred of the passion we saw in Julia Roberts’ Brockovich, the partisan audience, populated mostly by shrieking girls, has lost any powers of discernment by the end of the opening credits, and no one seems to mind. In what one might ambitiously attribute to strategic casting, or perhaps to serendipity, the parts of the maids continually upstage those of their employers. With a nuance that is completely incongruous with the emotional shallowness of the rest of the film, a tremendous Viola Davis seems to carry the woes of her people in every line of her face, with a heart-wrenching final soliloquy that almost compensates for the unforgivable naffness of the two hours leading up to it.

Plucked from relative obscurity, Octavia Spencer is marvellous as a co-conspirator who single-handedly provides most of the laughs, albeit at the expense of some outrageous black stereotyping which surely undermines the entire moral grounding of the film. Jessica Chastain also diversifies into comedy with an alarming change of pace from the existential moroseness of The Tree of Life, and Bryce Dallas Howard is the most abhorrent of caricatures as a morally bankrupt housewife, providing a comic villain worthy of Disney.

Viola Davis’s Aibileen reassures a child in her care: ‘You is kind. You is smart. You is important.’ I’m not sure the same could be said for the writer; apparently the novel upon which the film is based was rejected sixty times by publishers before earning grudging acceptance. In adapting it, DreamWorks has tapped shamelessly into the P.S. I Love You bank of sappiness, complete with a self-congratulatory guide to being a good person. Nevertheless, there was barely a dry eye in the Arts Picturehouse.