Christmas Eve, we started watching this movie – it’s long, two and a half hours, so we saved the last hour for Christmas day. It’s not a comfortable movie, by any means. It takes place in Mississippi during the early 60s, when wealthy southern white families employed black help – maids – who raised their children, did their laundry, cooked and cleaned and basically took care of the household while the white women lived superficial lives.
Then one white woman, portrayed by Emma Stone, enters the picture. Emma has aspirations to write, to be a journalist, a novelist, and begins to befriend the black maids, encouraging them to tell them her stories. And their stories are so profoundly tragic you wonder how they survived long enough to relate them to this young white woman.
At first, only one of the black maids is willing to talk to her – Aibeleen, portrayed by Viola Davis – and her performance is stunning, genuine, and will probably win her an Oscar nomination. This woman feels what her characters feels, she is there. Once Aiebeleen begins talking to the Emma Stone character, other black maids gradually come on board, and we see the under currents of what their lives are like, how the KKK burned their children, razed their homes, and terrorized them to the point where they accepted crumbs simply to remain employed, so they could send their children to college.
During this era, I was living in Venezuela, so I never saw this blatant indentured servitude. During the movie, though, Rob remarked that I did see this kind of attitude – I’m better than you – with the way Venezuelans were treated by the Americans who worked for the oil companies. “You had maids,” he said.
Yes, many American families did have maids – but they usually were from Spain or some other country, immigrants who needed work and were given lodging, food and a salary. Generally, these maids did not raise their employers’ children. They were not substitute parents. There was a definite difference.
However, when we used to return to the U.S. each year for vacation, I clearly recall the segregated bathrooms at the Florida turnpike rest stops and remember asking my mother what that was about. There are several powerful scenes in The Help about blacks and whites using the same restrooms – they carry diseases, one white woman tells her young daughter – and it’s really hard to believe that anyone capable of rational thought actually believed any of it. In this sense, white American women are viewed as stupid, clueless, and cold.
But maybe that’s the point of this movie. In that particular era, before blacks even had the right to vote, the hierarchy in society was blatant. Unless you were a white man, you were pretty much invisible and as powerful or as powerless as the white person for whom you worked. Still, it’s difficult to believe that white women were as shallow and mindless as most of the women depicted in this film. Yet, in retrospect, I clearly remember my mother commenting years ago that I should apply to Vassar, where women would meet men who could support them. Good husbands, in other words. And yet, my mother wasn’t a superficial woman. More than anything else, she was a product of her time, her generation, and wasn’t able to move beyond that.
When The Help first came out, I remember that MSNBC had Melissa Harris Perry, an African American professor at Tulane, review the movie. She tweeted frequently during the film, and her bottom line was that the movie was good, but didn’t provide the full story about that era, that it was a white woman’s story about what was happening to black women.
Or, put another way, it had the same theme as Avatar. In that movie, the Americans move in to study the culture and help them to overthrow the evil corporation that is attempting to mine the planet’s minerals. Outsider arrives, strives to right the wrongs, leads the people to freedom. That archetype. It’s the greatest weakness of The Help. And yet, when the disempowered and the helpless find a voice in someone who has the ability and connections to communicate their plight, do color and ideology matter?
Yes, Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement in the sixties. But it wasn’t a movement that pertained only to African-Americans. It spoke to the larger group of disenfranchised individuals, women and men of all color. The greatest strength of this film is that it speaks to all people who have been abandoned, disenfranchised, minimalized, shuffled aside in favor of the few who have it all. In the end, maybe it all boils down to the Occupy movement.
The 99 percent versus the one percent. But maybe even that disparity doesn’t address all of it. The Help will certainly be an Oscar contender.
I read the book and loved it. I also saw the movie and thought it was a bit more one-sided than the book, but that is often the case. I loved them both, and the book’s characters were more well drawn, but Viola Davis simply MADE the movie happen! Good review…
Good to know the contrast between book and movie. Thanks, DJan!
odd your post today on this subject as the movie i watched this morning – island in the sun – dealt with interracial issues, as well – would that i could add to the positive side of this era but i cannot – at least in terms of my own parents’ perspective of such matters – my parents financially wanted for nothing and most of my childhood/adolescence [40s-50s -by the 60s i was married] we were tended by others, our homes [we moved frequently] were tended by others, our meals cooked by others etc – these others being women of color, but for the few men of color also employed at different times by our parents – our extended family also had domestic help – now, notwithstanding that our domestic help did virtually everything for us on a daily basis, there were certain dramatic lines that were drawn on even the most minute activity – our domestic help could not eat from the same china or silver as we ate, or drink from the same set of crystal – or use the front door unless it was with one of us – all of those horrific kinds of things – some of my earliest memories stem from my own lack of understanding and outrage at this kind of discriminate treatment and some of my worst punishments came as a result of speaking up and out about it to my parents – before my sister died, she related something i’d forgotten – of how one of our “nannys” was a college graduate and how our mother bragged of this to the other white women of her circle – in any event, perhaps many white women were just the product of their own environments – but – for me, the issue is not what we have endured – not to what we individually have perhaps been subjected as children – have witnessed – experienced – but exactly what we are going to take away from it – and do about it differently – will we break the cycle with our own words and acts or will we continue the cycle of such discriminatory behavior – a very moving film, from all i have heard and one i look forward to seeing – thanks so much for posting of it –
Island in the Sun: one of my favorites of the old time goodies. And your perspective, gypsy, is terrific. Breaking the cycle….
The movie’s on my dvd list, but I did read the book. What I loved was how the Emma Stone character, can’t remember her name, backed into enlightenment about our mutual humanity when she needed a writing gig. She got Aibeleen to give her cleaning tips for a column she signed up to write in the local newspaper, despite never having cleaned a thing in her white southern priviliged life. It’s the relationship between them that serves them both; I think the Emma Stone character gained a great deal more in personal liberty and integrity than anyone else in the story. This is a young white southern woman’s first novel, I believe; I think it went a long way to capture the story of southern women, afro-american and anglo-american, in the paradigm shift of the 60s. I do hope the movie does the book justice.
I’m going to have to read the book now.
Sounds a very powerful film. Not sure, but I would think that the 50s were probably the worst for black people in England. They were encouraged to come here to fill the vacancies on London Transport and other places but were soon met by signs of ‘No Blacks, Irish And Dogs’ at lodging houses. It’s difficult to understand but, even yesterday, an Indian was shot in Manchester, England in what has been described as a racially motivated killing. It seems ‘we’ still have lots to learn.
It’s sad that these racially motivate crimes still happen.
I haven’t watched the movie yet, but I read the book and loved it. Just as movies tend to do, it sounds as if the storyline has been diluted. In the book it was not about a white woman who comes in as the avenging angel – it was more about a white woman who adored her own maid, feeling she was more mother than her own mother, wanting to write their story – at great peril – which she acknowledges is more for the black maids than herself. The book was excellent – I only hope the movie does it justice.
There was thta element about the woman’s personal story with her nanny – but it seemed to be tacked on, like a postscript.
I think, for every event and story in life, there is a dark side and a light side. Fortunately, I was privy to the light side of this tragic evolution of people of color in this country. My grandmother and grandfather on my Mother’s side were quite economically comfortable; home in one of the nicest areas of Atlanta. Granny had a black maid, Bessie. But in our situation, Bessie was an essential member of the family and was loved and respected as such. Granny was brittle diabetic and had other serious health issues, (cardiac), and Bessie was not only chief cook and bottle washer, etc., but was a wonderful care-giver for Granny and for us grandchildren when we would spend weeks there in the summers. My grandparents treated her as an equal, which was simply not done in those days, and they were criticized for doing so, but it didn’t matter to them. Bessie lived in the house, had a lovely apartment attached, and she was critically essential to the gentle flow of the house and home. I was so lucky in this regard. My Dad had several black men working for him; he was a cattleman; and he, also, treated his black employees with the same respect and attitude he had towards his white employees…and we lived in Montgomery in the MLK days, so Dad was also razzed about his equal treatment of his black friends. Like Granny and Granddaddy, to my Dad it didn’t matter what other people said or thought. I remember as a child being shocked by the treatments towards blacks in the homes of my friends, because it was so different in mine, and often the parents called my family “the “n” word “lovers”. I didn’t understand it, then. As I grew up, I was able to see the horrors, and felt so blessed to have a family that drew no color lines and even though they suffered for it, they continued to be non-rascists. There are a few stories like this, few and far between, but thank God they DID happen on occasion, and I’m blessed to have had a family that was black and white with no shades of gray. Your post is timely; that movie reminds me of the movie A TIME TO KILL….about the black father who killed the white men who raped and tortured his nine-year-old daughter, timeline the same.
It’s good to hear a positive story about that era.