The next movie we watched recently was The Help. What a terrific movie. Every time I mentioned to Scott that I wanted to see it or that it was moving up on our Netflix que, I got a nice eye roll and comments about how he didn't want to watch it or see it. At the end, I'm pretty sure he enjoyed it as much as I did. Maybe even more. :)
This movie as everyone knows is based off of the book The Help, which I got to read about 9 months or so ago. Amazing book and the movie adaptation does a very good job of duplicating it. There were a few things that I noticed that were just a tad different involving the involvement of Ms. Celia Foote's character, but otherwise I felt as though they pretty much used the book as the script for the movie. When you read the book, you always picture what the characters would look like and I believe they got these characters spot on. Viola Davis (who played Aibileen) and Octavia Spencer (who played Minny) deserved the nominations and awards that they received this year. What terrific portrayals of these characters in that you really got the sense that they were actually them and not the characters that they were playing.
The premise of the movie is about a young, white, want to be writer, Skeeter (played by Emma Stone), who decides to write a book about the African-American maids that work for the white families and their point of view on their experience. It is a heartbreaking movie set in the 1960's where you see African-American maids growing up with white families, taking care of their households, raising their children, and how they feel about all of it. The white children look to them as their "mother" as they are the ones that raised them all those years, but then they grow up to treat them like they are nothing. It is a vicious cycle of childhood innocence where children are accepting of everyone until they learn from their parents and their society that someone else isn't worth as much just because of the color of their skin. That innocence the majority of the time turns to coldness to the person that brought them up. Minny even says to Skeeter, "And how we love they cheerin' when they're little and then they turn out just like they mama's."
As Skeeter sits down to write her book, one of the first questions that she asks Aibileen is, "What does it feel like to raise a white child, when your own child's at home being looked after by somebody else?" She was wondering why a maid would put that much heart and soul into the children that they raise only to eventually get nothing in return. They put more energy into other people's children than they are able to give their own.
There are two characters in the book who are able to look beyond the color of skin and that is of Skeeter and Celia Foote. Skeeter had a maid, Constantine, who she idolized and thought of as the one who taught her everything. Celia Foote's case was a bit different in that she had no friends and the girls in the town wanted nothing to do with her, so she made the only friend she could in her maid, Minny. She wanted to eat lunch with her and be around her to get that acceptance she couldn't get from the rest of the town.
It was a very dangerous time for these maids to be a part of this book so many gave a swift "no" at the start. It was only when one of their friends got arrested for stealing and the witness of the brutality in which the police treated her that made all of the maids want to help Skeeter with her book. A lot of people who complain about this movie say its just another white girl showing how good she is helping the African-American people. I don't see it that way at all. I see incredibly brave African-Amercian women wanting to get their voice heard in a way that wouldn't bring harm to them or their families. If they were to say any of these things publicly, they would either be put in jail or worse. They needed an outlet that would allow their stories to be heard without the consequences of what could come of them.
At the end of the movie, Skeeter goes off to New York to work full time but the maids are all still left in Jackson with what has come of the book. Many people in their town were able to figure out who the maids were based off of the stories, but no one wanted to admit the stories to the public that they knew were about them, so the maids were safe as far as we knew. The movie ends with Aibileen walking down the street about as far as she could go before it fades away. This was a perfect end to the movie as you didn't know where she would be going or how things were going to end up. They were just going to be and live with whatever was going to come to them.
Image courtesy of EntertainmentWallpaper.com
It is a great movie!
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