The Help
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(Running time: 137 Minutes) Rated PG-13
Starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer
The Help is my pick for best movie of the year so far. This is an amazing movie providing personal accounts about racism, woman’s liberation and man’s (or woman’s) inhumanity to man.
The story opens with Skeeter (Stone), a young woman recently graduated from college in the early 1960’s returning to her home in Jackson, Mississippi. She wants to be a writer and gets a job doing a cleaning column for the local paper. The movie shifts to other women in Skeeter’s circle of friends, the African American women they hire to be maids and how they treat them. The movie pulls no punches although it does lace the story with wry humor.
“The Help” hits hard, showing rank discrimination of the worst kind, demeaning treatment of workers as if they were not human beings. Also, we get a peek into the world of the women who are the maids, what their lives are like and the fear they live with every day.
Skeeter strives to break out of the mold, deciding to write a book about what it feels like to be a maid and the real story of the bad treatment they receive. The book is written in secret as there’d be serious retaliation if the women of the town knew.
The movie shows the shaky courage exhibited by the women who have worked long hours for tiny wages in the homes of smug, abusive white women all their lives. We see how control over the social life in Jackson is exerted by a handful of women who ostracize anyone at will. The pressure to conform is tremendous.
Skeeter’s publisher isn’t happy with only the two maids Skeeter has and insists on more. Unfortunately no other women are brave enough to come forward until Medgar Evers, a famous civil rights leader, is killed.
The book gets published and there is hell to pay for Skeeter and one maid but all the women who participated in it are proud of their commitment and the payback to the mean women of Jackson.
This is a beautifully written, acted and filmed movie. If you want to expose your children to what it felt like to be discriminated against on the inside of society, this is the place to get that lesson. There is some bad language, a touch of violence but no sex and is best for sophisticated kids 11 and up who will understand what’s going on. There are some sad parts, so bring tissues but I laughed often as well. The Help is a long movie worth every minute. I believe there will be a number of academy award nominations for this movie, so don’t miss it.
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