THE HELP (MOVIE)

The Help (Movie)

The Help (Movie)

Introduction

Famous movie “The Help” was directed by Tate Taylor and produced by Chris Columbus, Brunson Green and Michael Barnathan from the novel by Kathryn Stockett.The actors include Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain, Cicely Tyson, Sissy Spacek and Mary Steenburgen. By moving the novel's first interview scene between Aibileen and Skeeter to the very beginning of the film and showing only Aibileen, who continues her self-revelation in voice-overs throughout the film, Tate effectively shifts the film's overall perspective away from the white Skeeter (self-righteous in the book but endearingly played by Stone in the film) to the more appropriate author of/authority on her own black story, Aibileen. This paper discusses facts, concepts, or ideas from the movie that stimulate the interests.

Discussion

Forests have been felled and terabytes downloaded (filling every Nook and Kindle) to produce copies of Kathryn Stockett's The Help, the best-selling source novel for Tate Taylor's film adaptation. Stockett's seriocomic "conversion narrative" deals with Junior Leaguer Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan's awakening to racial injustice in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962-63. Skeeter (Emma Stone) has been raised by a wise and kind black maid Constantine (played in flashbacks by Cicely Tyson) who has mysteriously left her parents' employ. Skeeter seeks answers about Constantine and wonders what to do now with her four years of Ole Miss education. She finds a job writing a "Hints from Heloise" housekeeping column for her local newspaper, but, having zero domestic knowledge of her own to impart, Skeeter turns to her friend's maid Aibileen (Viola Davis) for help. Having made this connection, Skeeter is emboldened to try a larger, more dangerous project. She decides to interview Aibileen and her fellow maids to get "the story of the help from the help's own point of view." Only semicognizant of the retribution this might bring down, especially on her black collaborators, Skeeter sees the book as her path to a real job with a New York publisher (Mary Steenburgen). Meanwhile her brainless, white peers, led by arch villain Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), obsess about bridge games, charity galas, and a proposed sanitation law to ensure all black maids use their own separate toilets in white homes (thus preventing the spread of dreaded "black" diseases). (Byrd, 2010)

Theme Of Black Women Against The White-Gloved White Women

The preposterous fable sets a group of spirited, courageous, loving black women against the white-gloved white women of the Junior League who abuse them. These caricatured villains are led by Hilly HoIbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), who sends her maid, Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), out in a hurricane to use an outhouse so she won't spread her diseases in the sacred Holbrook bathroom, then fires her summarily when Minny overrides her edict. Doubtless Hilly's mistreatment of Minny is no worse than what many domestics suffered in Mississippi, but the movie piles on so many offenses that Hilly and her cohorts begin to seem like the devil's ...