THE HELP (2011)

 
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 12, 2012 11:07 pm    Post subject: THE HELP (2011) Reply with quote

Recreating an atmosphere must be a very difficult task for a movie producer, but The Help has probably succeeded in setting not just the details but the mood of 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, where Medgar Evers was assassinated.

One very nice thing about this movie, though, is that it doesn’t hit you over the head with its attempts at being “authentic.” It isn’t telling a story about race relations. It’s telling about a few people that we care about because they’re made real to us.

It’s as if this movie is doing a turn-around, to make up, in its small way, for the many, many movies where black people had servant roles–but nothing more than servant roles. You never got to know them. They were always suppressing their personalities, as good servants have been taught to do, in order to do their jobs well.

I spent most of my childhood in the segregated south. By 1963, I’d been gone for 10 years, and the southern schools had been desegregated, but the whole sick rigid class structure was still in place.

So in this movie we have a group of exquisitely turned out white women who run things in town (benefits, bridge clubs, the whole nine yards)–and we have their “help,” the black people, usually uniformed, who are paid a pittance to do the white people’s bidding.

The white women have their elegantly appointed houses with grounds, and they and their friends and families drink and act like slobs and look the other way at one another’s mistakes, even the grossly unjust ones, like Mrs. Phelan’s firing of her long-time servant Constantine, an aging woman who embarrasses her employer at an “important” function by not being fast enough when serving food to the guests.

One person among the white people seems to see the injustice everywhere around her and to care enough to try to do something about it-–Skeeter (Emma Stone), a young woman who wants to be a writer. She decides to collect stories from some of the black women who have worked as domestic servants in town and publish them, with identities hidden, so that the world will know what a southern black woman’s life is really like.

The difficulties she encounters in her project make up the plot here, and the way the story ends might be open to question but on thinking it over, I can see why it was the best ending.

It is high time that a movie showed the constant humiliation endured by black people in the south. The movie suggests that women–-black and white, working together on common ground, and shared domestic duties (cooking, child care, cleaning) are one area of common ground--can go far towards resolving some of the ancient racial conflict still plaguing the south.

Just how deeply that conflict is rooted in the southern psyche is clearly demonstrated in this story, which contains incidents involving the use of bathrooms–a big issue in the segregated south, and one that (in the 1940s-1950s) was regarded as settled for all time: a white person did not want to touch anything that had touched a black person, whether that was a barber’s scissors or a toilet seat or a drinking fountain.

That this attitude is warped, cruel, and unbalanced seems to have occurred to very few people in the south. It is in this climate that the story of The Help plays itself out. The black women who aren’t allowed to use the same bathroom in the houses they’re working in are expected to change the diapers and wipe the bottoms of the white children in those houses–-to the extent that the white women will leave their babies in their dirty diapers until the servant arrives to deal with them.

This movie is full of these details, the specifics that people may never have thought about when contemplating the “White” and “Colored” signs seen in photos in newsmagazines. Just what segregation meant on a daily basis (with or without signs) may never have entered the average person’s head. The signs were on public places-–public drinking fountains in parks, restrooms in restaurants and filling stations. The attitudes were handed down from parent to child, generation after generation.

This is a movie about how women at that time in that place treated one another. But it is also a movie about the power of the written word, and that fact sets it above a run-of-the-mill story.

Aibilene begins to see that power through Skeeter’s book project, and by the end Aibilene–-who is perhaps the most sympathetic character in the story–is seeing the possibilities of expressing herself in writing. The idea of telling one’s story or of telling any story is a powerful one, and knowing she is able to tell it gives her hope.
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