The Help: Touching Audiences Everywhere

The Help

 (Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain)

Beautiful performances by beautiful actresses bring The Help, a bestselling novel, to the big screen.  As a fan of the book, I quite enjoyed the movie that provided me with two tear jerking moments that the book didn’t bless me with.  Emma Stone plays the quirky Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan who’s only goal is to be an accomplished writer and much to her mother’s, played by Allison Janney, detestation not interested in finding a husband.  Skeeter decides to befriend a maid Aibileen, Viola Davis, to create a true account of what working for a white woman entails.

While reading the book I wanted to see how the relationships between two sets of people would be projected into an on-screen relationship.  The relationship between Skeeter and the woman who raised her, Constantine, was brought to life brilliantly.  At an early age we see that Skeeter has an unbreakable bond with her maid.  The connection between a child and her maid is crucial and for Skeeter it’s the most loving relationship she has ever had.  Another touching relationship was between Aibileen and the child she raises, Mae Mobley.  Mae Mobley loves Aibileen dearly, because she is the only mother figure the little girl has in her life.  Each of these relationships involves both a maid and a young girl, showing that love has no boundaries.  (FYI…both of these relationships were the moments that forced me into tears streaming down my face.)

The driving force in Jackson, Mississippi to keep the maids in their “rightful” positions is Miss Hilly Holbrook, played by Bryce Dallas Howard.  Hilly is the woman who believes “colored people” should be kept separate but equal in every aspect of the world including bathrooms, which brings about a quite hilarious moment.  In both the book and movie Hilly is a snobby, uptight bitch who thinks she rules the town and everyone that inhabits Jackson.  Hilly is the social pariah, the woman everyone in town listens to because she holds their reputations in her perfectly polished hands.  Howard brings the high and mighty Hilly to life portraying her with the ability to make the audience want to strangle her every time she is on the screen. 

Every actress did her part to bring each of their characters to life, but Octavia Spencer steals the show as Minny Jackson.  Minny is a sassy woman who doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone and shut her mouth, and that’s why we love her.  Minny protects Skeeter and the other maids in the story by revealing her own “terrible awful” truth that she swore she would never tell a soul about.  Minny is the comic relief in this serious and heartbreaking story.  Spencer is a star and it has never been more evident than in this movie. 

The Help is a must see movie that will make you think about what the south was like during the times when the white population needed the black to survive, yet didn’t give them equal rights.  Although the film doesn’t fully encompass all the hell the colored people endured at the hands of the white, it does show just what the problems were in the south and how one person with a dream can change life in a small way. 

It’s hard to believe this kind of life was being lived just fifty years ago, luckily these attitudes have changed.  The Help is a touching movie that everyone must see and have in their movie collection.  

Always remember…“You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”

(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454029/)