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.
