How much you give yourself over to the saccharine charms of The Help depends on how open you are to an audience-baiting film that exploits the serious issues of class conflict and racism, using them as fodder for Southern-fried, seriocomic melodrama. It also depends on your ability not to cringe at a story whose hero is a young, pampered white woman who decides to shoulder the burden of her hometown's institutionalized racism.

Based on the best-selling debut novel of the same name by Kathryn Stockett, The Help takes place in Jackson, Mississippi, during the racially charged atmosphere of the early 1960s. Against that rich dramatic backdrop, the meaningful subjects of prejudice and race relations are given a soapy presentation that does a disservice to the same black characters it pretends to champion.

Critics of the book The Help gave it credit for being a page-turner. I guess roughly the same can be said about its cinematic offspring — thanks to a cast of "look-at-me" performances, it's certainly watchable. But at nearly two hours and 20 minutes, just barely.

As the film begins, Skeeter (Emma Stone), fresh out of college, returns to Jackson with designs on making a living as a writer. While "Novelist" is clearly her aspiration, she applies her pluck and persistence to land a job at the local newspaper writing an advice column about housekeeping. Knowing nothing about the topic, she consults Aibileen (Viola Davis), the black housekeeper of Skeeter's best friend, for her knowledge.

Their relationship takes a more serious turn when Skeeter gets the notion to write a book based on Aibileen's experience taking care of well-to-do Southern families and raising their children. Aibileen's friend Minny, also a housekeeper, initially resists Skeeter's entreaties but decides that she, too, will tell her story — so long as nothing is left out.

There's something unsavory about a story in which heartbreaking experiences are placed in the service of someone's literary aspirations. That Skeeter's book of interviews — also called The Help — is attributed to "anonymous" doesn't make it any less of a rung on her ladder to success as a novelist. When Skeeter gets a job offer with a Manhattan publishing company, it's hard not to feel the twinge of cosmic embarrassment.

Though it doesn't intend to, The Help ends up trivializing the injustices it depicts. The black characters are defined mainly in terms of what they do as house servants, while the vain, lily-white ladies-who-lunch are caricatures, thus taking the edge off the insidiousness of their racism.

Based on the preview screening I saw, audiences are willing to take this manipulative hokum seriously. Snobby Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), the central villain of the piece, eventually gets her comeuppance in gross-out, crowd-pleasing fashion. Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), the pretty flake who is shunned by Hilly and her inner circle, provides easy laughs and — in the film's conventional moral symmetry — ends up hiring and bonding with Minny. A trite subplot involving Skeeter's budding romance with a dreamboat resolves itself when he turns out to be — what else? — a narrow-minded reactionary. Even when the townfolk are shown reading Skeeter's anonymously published The Help, there's no sense that they're doing anything more than indulging in safe voyeurism, and the film doesn't ridicule them for their obtuseness.

The best that can be said about The Help is that its characters and sets are vividly rendered. But those performances would have worked better in a different movie. The Help dissolves horrible injustices into a weepy feel-good story that resolves its plot points all too neatly. It manages the execrable feat of taking a shameful chapter in our nation's history and turning it into a kind of melodramatic comfort food. It's cornpone through and through.