The Help (2011)
This is going to be a really weird review and uncharacteristically short.
I enjoyed the movie, but I hate the background of it; reconciling the content versus the creation is very hard.
“The Help” (2011) was based on the book The Help (2009).
It was about the staggering racism of mid-century America in the Deep South, and the gross era of white people somehow thinking “separate but equal” meant anything beyond a superiority play.
The story generally focused around Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) a black maid getting mistreated by the well-off white family she worked for.
I’m not against the concept of maids or butlers or whatever, as long as you pay them properly and respect them as human beings.
In 1950s Mississippi, the help was underpaid and verbally abused, and the movie didn’t shy away from showing that.
But here’s my issue:
The story followed a white woman, Skeeter (Emma Stone), who was inconvenienced by her spot in life because she wasn’t fulfilled enough - she wanted to be a famous journalist, but didn’t have the experience.
So she got herself a job answering a house-keeping “Dear Daisy”-type column in the local newspaper, but didn’t know anything about house-keeping, so she asked Aibileen for notes.
As Skeeter got closer to Aibileen, she saw more and more about how terrible the majority of the white families were to their maids. She started collecting stories and eventually published them as a book called ‘The Help,’ which swept the country by storm. The book was written under a pseudonym, but some big-wig paper knew she wrote it and offered her a job.
Aibileen and the other maids, on the other hand, continued to get mistreated.
So while we watched the maids get mistreated, the white lead got exactly what she wanted and the black maids didn’t go anywhere.
The real book this movie was based on was written by a white woman.
That all just feels wrong to me.
It’s not a complaint that the racism made me uncomfortable - I would be far more concerned if I was okay with it for some reason.
No; there’s something about a white woman who wrote a very successful book about a white woman who’s success was ultimately built on the suffering of black women that just sits super not great with me.
And I realize this wasn’t a movie that was going to end with fairy-tale happiness for the maids - that’s not how real life happened and the movie showing otherwise would be wildly disingenuous, but “fictional white woman gets what she wants while real-life white woman also gets what she wants” isn’t something I appreciated as background knowledge.
The movie itself was outstanding. The actors were great; Hillie (Bryce Dallas Howard) was a horrible clique leader and Cecilia (Jessica Chastain) was… lost… most of the time, Skeeter was well done.
The set pieces were grand and the costumes matched - all of it looked period-perfect.
I’m going to give this a 4-Claw review because it’s a reminder of an era that we should be ashamed of, and trying to pretend it didn’t happen is absolutely not the answer and the movie itself told an outstanding story.
Had the movie simply been about a maid telling her stories in some kind of memoir and not about a white woman’s sorta-success, I think the background of the movie would have sat much better with me.
