Why The Help is an Important Movie

Warning
This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
                    Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
Also, hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers. 

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The Help - Movie 2011 USA - 106 Mins

Not the greatest movie ever made, but an important one that is really, really, really watchable.

 

The Help is based on a novel written by a white woman, telling a story mainly from an African American point of view – it starts with the story of Aibileen Clark, a Black maid whose life has been spent caring for white babies.

It is 1963 in Jackson Mississippi, and Aibileen is talking to Skeeter, a white girl she has known most of her life. Talking to Skeeter takes a lot of courage. Why they are talking and what they are talking about is the whole point of this movie.
 

Skeeter dreams of being a writer, but the first publication she is involved with turns out to be a coordinating effort – collating the personal stories of the Black maids who raise the white babies of Jackson Mississippi.

This movie is a roller coaster ride through the history of Jim Crow in the South, as it was in the Civil Rights era.

Part of the challenge Skeeter faced was overcoming the Black maids’ very rational fear of the law, or even just white power to retaliate without consequence, in order to get the women to tell their stories. And so, part of this story is about how and why the women did eventually come forward to tell their stories, so their truth would be told.

The bottom line – once we get past lynchings, murders, economic misery and so on – is that racism is just plain rude. The white ladies in this movie have impeccable Southern manners at times but a few of them are just rude punts at heart, and we can’t help but choose sides in stories like this. When I took my 80 something, old school "White-Australia-equal-but-different aunt" to see this at the Gold Class Cinema, she very quickly sided with the African Americans, and whooped and hollered a couple of times when the white punts got their comeuppance. (I’m not sure whether the Irish Coffee she had delivered to her seat had anything to do with it).

This movie is not all sweetness and light, but it is not all doom and gloom either.

My one criticism is that the character of Skeeter’s mother does not ring true – it’s inconsistently ridiculous and patent bullshit to the point of “get real, this is corny, don’t insult me” fury. However, everything else about the movie more than makes up for it, including some great minor character parts.

Most of the reviews of this film agreed with me that the Oscar belonged to Viola Davis, not Octavia Spencer, but hey, there were several knockout performances in this movie, including one by Jessica Chastain. Octavia Spencer’s character was more “appealing” than other Oscar possibles, I suppose.
 

So, let me say it again in case you haven’t read one of my other reviews yet where I state the bleeding obvious – no single script is ever going to cover every important aspect of a single topic. This movie cannot say everything important that needs to be said about the consequences of U.S racial history, or the blah, blah and blah of slavery. That said, I should draw your attention to some valid criticisms of both the movie and the original book that are listed in Wikipedia. They provide good hints for further thinking or reading if this topic is new for you.
 

The film has been criticised under the White Saviour rule: What the script writers tried to do in anticipation was make clear that the book The Help which was published as part of the movie narrative was primarily the maid Aibileen Clark’s book, because she was the one who found a way to get started – she found a “voice” for the first story. (Those of you who are writers will know exactly what I mean by this.)

 

The character of Minnie was also given a line raising the issue of whether Black people needed someone like Skeeter to help them get the truth publicised (perhaps in anticipation of criticism under the "Grateful Slave" rule.)
For the purposes of the book published in the movie, we should be realistic and accept it is unlikely the book project would have got off the ground without

• Skeeter’s white drive (entitlement/ lack of self-doubt),
• her white connections (name and college degree), and
• total ignorance of just what she was asking the maids to risk.

------And then it would not have finished without the total courage of a character like Minnie.

A Wikipedia article about the original novel on which the movie is based tells us that a woman named Ablene Cooper tried to sue the author. There is a link to an especially interesting article about this in the Daily Mail (UK paper). If we live long enough we eventually realise that all fiction is some combination of fact and tact. Some authors have more tact than others, and what separates published authors from those who are never published is often simply the courage to publish and be damned – hence the popularity of Anne Lamott’s advice that “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.”

 

I don’t personally think that a white woman openly writing about how the African American maids might have felt raising white babies was an example of cultural appropriation in practice. Though I’m sure plenty will be miffed that an African American was not published first, this might well have been a case of better something be said than nothing.

I loved the book, but I love this movie too.

Edit April 2019 - What?

Here's a link to an alternative view of the book
https://acriticalreviewofthehelp.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/you-is/

There are slabs of my life "missing", but the time during which I read this book the question might not be so much a matter of  "where was I?" but "where was my mind?" (Or maybe it was "what medication was I taking?" ). Sometimes I feel like I'm a fraud and I'm imagining I have mental illness, and then things like this hit me. This can't possibly be ideal.

For a white author, Stockett crosses the line. And I def wasn't paying attention when I read the book because there are rules about dialect, too.

I actually came back to see if I'd mentioned this moment:

It's not a moment that provides any great turning point in the story, but it has come back to me, day after day and week after week since I saw the movie. It comes back to me every time I encounter hate and marginalisation, which is all the time. It just makes no sense to me.
I'm not a person of colour and I don't know the half of it, but what marginalisation I do have to deal with myself is exhausting. And when people go to such extreme lengths to dish it out it never ceases to astound me.
When people marginalise themselves, it saddens me.
I re-visit this Viola Davis moment in my head all the time.

And while I have no desire to hurt or offend anyone, it's also exhausting living in a world where there are so many man made barriers preventing us from trusting or being trusted.

Anyway... for all that it is a "white" story, I'll stand by my conviction that the movie has merit.

It is only by telling and re-telling history that we keep it alive and expose each succeeding generation to the truth - history can never be "over" and it would be a travesty if "the powers that be" took back ownership of history and perpetuated - without challenge - the crap that is often core school curriculum in Western countries.

 

 

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The best thing I've seen recently if you are interested in learning more about Southern Racism in this era is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which actually covers both the what and the why of the whole foul business of race in America from start to finish - including now.

 

I know I keep flogging it... but this is a blog by an Australian so Australians might ask why I should care? Well... the psychology behind federalism in the U.S. is awfully familiar, for starters, and the impact on people of colour. (Don't get me started on what is happening to Indigenous Australians...)

 

(Illegal for blacks to play chess against whites in Mississippi ... seriously?)