The Help tells the story of a plucky young writer, Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, who has decided to write a book about black maids who raise white children in her hometown. We are in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963. Jim Crow. Segregation. Lynching. Medgar Evers assassinated. Still, this movie aspires to make you feel good.
And it failed.
The only positive thing about this movie is that it put several good Black actors on a screen before a wide audience. Maybe this movie will be a vehicle to higher ground for some of them.
The graceful Viola Davis plays Aibileen convincingly but we knew she was magical after we saw her opposite Meryl Streep. The renowned thespian herself urged the Hollywood powers that be to "give her [Davis] a movie" during the 2009 SAG Awards.
There has been much praise for Octavia Spencer's Minnie. Spencer committed to the role but in the end Minnie is an "sass-mouthin'" Mammy who "lah to fry chicken" and makes farcical facial expressions because you know Black folks of that era were all "slow of speech and slow of tongue." Hmm hmm.
Emma Stone played her role, Skeeter, faithfully, affecting an awkward walk that bespeaks her character's socially maladroit behaviors. She's a college-educated woman who is actively pursuing a writing career. She does not seem interested in marriage, has never been on a proper date. When she speaks to the Black maids about their hardships she has the innocent look of someone who knows she's landed on something big but doesn't know exactly what. She takes the fact that they are breaking the law at face value. Her ambition to produce "serious writing" about something "that makes her uncomfortable" overrides her fear. She is, as The Washington Post's Express columnist Kristen Page-Kirky puts it, "magically, emphatically not racist."
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She is right in that the movie is about a contemporary issue -- abuse of domestic workers. But, that is precisely why this movie failed. This movie's tone makes it clear that it is talking about 1960s Jackson, Mississippi. It is too tight a context to allow us to think of our current maids, gardeners, and nannies. If it did that people would not have cried joyously in the theatre, feeling so good that we have come so far, they would have been ashamed.
If director Tate Taylor wanted to make a film about the plight of domestic workers, he might have made one about a Hispanic or Haitian nanny in Brooklyn.
Women, foreign-born and people of color account for 95 percent of domestic workers, says a 2009 UCLA study. The study also reports that 33 percent of respondents said they had suffered verbal/physical abuse. Another 35 percent declined to answer, which means maybe. According to a study from the states of California and New York there are a total of 2.5 million domestic workers in the United States. Sixty percent of these people say they receive less than minimum wage, which means about 60 percent of employers are willfully violating the Law.
So there is plenty of strife to wrestle with here in our day, if the filmmakers wanted to make a conscious-raising movie.
"Women like me will see "The Help" and think we're like Skeeter because we have some black Facebook friends," Kirby admits. "Combating our privilege is something we have to learn to do, sometimes daily -- and the fact that Skeeter does it in a world where her higher status is assumed as the natural order of things is pure fairy tale."
The movie goes out of its way to give us the white trash character of Celia who been ostracized by the whole society of polite white women who hold bridge parties. The rumor goes she got married after she had been knocked up by someone's else beau. This character behaves like a child, talks like a child and dresses in ice-cream flavor colors. When she hires Minnie as her maid, she responds to her as if to a mother. This relationship is meant to be a counterweight to the blatant racism of other characters, most notably Hilly who now refuses to share a bathroom with the maid who raised her. But Minnie and Celia form a fairy tale relationship for Celia holds financial power over Minnie. They could never be equal or anything like mother and daughter because Celia prances around in a halter top while Minnie sweats over her paw-paws in a uniform, complete with white stockings. {I don't suppose sheer brown had yet been invented!}
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Then Minnie tries to explain to her boss Celia, who wants to impress her husband with her non-existent culinary skills, why she could not be her secret maid. Her husband had to know Minnie had been hired for if he found her on his property, he might "shoot me." This line is said in exaggeration and played for laughs. But it is not funny. There are enough stories of white folks shooting black folks for petty reasons made legitimate in the era of Jim Crow.
Later Celia's husband does find Minnie on the property. She runs, he chases her. The audience laughs. This is akin to creating a scene where a Jew is running from someone she thinks might be a Nazi sympathizer but who is in fact just a friendly guy. That scene would not be acceptable. It is never acceptable to make light of the Holocaust. Why is it acceptable to make light of segregation?
There are things that you must have whole or not at all.If the Civil Rights activists had compromised and said we are no longer slaves, that's Freedom enough, where would we be?
Freedom cannot bear compromise. You are either wholly Free or not at all. So they marched and they sang and they endured. The truth is another thing that will not bear fragmentation. If you deal in truth, then you must give the whole truth. Yet, this movie took on segregation as if it were a sidebar. They wanted to show the truth of it but not too much, so as not to make anyone uncomfortable. They mentioned Evers being shot but they did not show the extent of that tragedy or what it really meant to the movement. They treated Minnie's defiance of white people as if it were just bad girl naughtiness. What she did with that pie could have got her killed!
Minnie baked a special pie for her former white employer who fired her because she had used the house bathroom while a hurricane tore through Jackson, killing at least 10 people.
Once the filmmakers had made the shit joke, they kept referencing it over and over again. Cheap laughs.
Are we so over racism that we can now laugh at it? I do not think so. Some of the same problems that separated us then separate us now. People will say "But I have nothing against black people!" I applaud you. Yet the fact remains that "79 percent or more of black and Hispanic children in public schools cannot read or do math at grade level in the fourth, eighth or 12th grades."
Perhaps we have, in some places, in some stations, in some professions, achieved equality of opportunity. Every black person knows that equality of opportunity is a hard-earned victory against real adversities like unequal access to education and fantastical adversities -- those battles we have to fight against the shadow of ourselves. The shadow at your heel, stalking you, relentlessly asking "Who do you think you are? When has a Black Person ever _____ (Insert here your greatest dream)?"
That question persists in some minds because we have yet to achieve de facto equality, when there is a truly representative political class, a truly representative merchant class, a truly representative prison population.1
Until then the shit in the pie is just a distraction.
Notes:
1. Federal Bureau of Prisons: 38 percent of prisoners are Black yet Blacks only make up 13 percent of the population at large.
I raise two virtual pennies for your thought. Did you love, hate, or just avoid this film? Tell us in the comments!
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Leslie Jordan: My Not-So-Secret Crush on the Set of The Help
We have come a long way, thank God. Slavery is gone and the memory of Jim Crow is dying. Our grandchildren will think we were nuts if they see that we were reviewing a movie that lightly documents the 50's from a southern maids point of view by saying it was crap because more blacks are in jail 50 years later than one would expect from the size of the black population.
Several posters have alluded to the fact that no movie, book, or television series will be the catalyst for the end of racism. The fact that Stockett was so moved by the domestics of her childhood to pen this novel speaks volumes.
The language I didn't care for, but I happen to know for a fact that this was part of the "mask"
worn by blacks during the era. One never drew attention to their intellect and mastery of the language because it was off-putting. It could also be the difference between life and death. Having relatives that grew up in the Jim Crow South in rural communities stories like Stockett's were not uncommon. Some people only upheld the peculiarities in order to not become targeted. Not every single white person was comfortable even back then with the Jim Crow ideologies. They couldn't voice that or else suffer being ostracized or fates similar to their black counterparts.
I walked away feeling empowered by the unity of women. The good that could be done. Like it or hate it The Help was what it was a story meant to capture our attention and entertain.
...made me cringe a bit ( I have a president, I too can love fried chicken in public now) but there were many things in it that were great.
Many of the stories my mother and grandmother told me about how blacks and whites in the south are here, the raising of white children by black women Watching Emma Stone's character learn about the truth about Jim Crow and the life she's seen as "normal" is exceptionally well done. And the complexity of the true-love /true-hate relationship between is whites and blacks is absolutely priceless....and again doing serious and moving into a laugh or two back to serious makes it entertaining as well as informative for people who didn't have this verbal history passed down to them
Go See It.
(Pssst---It'll be about another decade or so before a similar story is told/acknowledged about race relations OUTSIDE the south)
9 out 10 stars: This movie with a nearly all female cast is The Anti-Blind Side. Somehow this is a LIGHT movie that will make you angry, laugh, and cry while:
1)Race matters and is seen
2) Nobody's a hero for not having seen race.
3) The white "heroine" has to come to terms with racism in people close to her and in some ways herself for having ignored it
4) Whites are shown to be hurt by their own unacknowledged racism
5) There's a real life ending.
This is a very serious subject is dealt with in an almost light-hearted way which makes it's historical accuracy easy to absorb. And in a world where newspapers are almost obsolete and texting sans whole words is the preferred way of communicating, this is the MOST IMPORTANT thing about this film.
The picture is told from the point of view of two characters, beginning with the black maid (Viola Davis) and the white woman (Emma Stone) who starts collecting black maids stories. And unlike a host of other pictures of this type, this story is NOT told as if only the white characters can take action, have ideas, and be brave.
It's not a perfect film on race in America but it's a significant part of the story. There are a couple of things that made me cringe...
You said a lot here. In addition, I wondered what was in this movie that drew so many white females to the theater. I did not see this type of support for other movies depicting the African American female such as "Waiting to Exhale or When Stella Got Her Groove Back" (or something like that). This was just a thought mmmmmm.
Not all racists were murders, or Klan members. Not every single interaction resulted in injury or death for them. Instead, the movie shows the pervasiveness of the racism, the banality of casual, institutionalized bigotry and ignorance, the oppressive fear that permeated all black/white relationships.
Skeeter wasn't shown to rescue or save these women, she was an almost unwitting outlet for their dignified despair. While some of the characterizations were broad, the overall effect actually was almost all positive for the black characters, and almost all negative for the white ones. It took a different kind of courage for Skeeter, but it was always apparent that the true strength and courage lay with the maids.
People don't feel good when they leave the movie because we've now conquered hate and racism. But we HAVE come a long way, and the generations before us need to see how things WERE, while still recognizing there's a long way to go before what we are where we need to be.
If you want to write a book or make a movie about an important white figure of the civil rights movement make a movie about Pete Seeger. Remember him? Remember how he popularized "We Shall Overcome" and was blacklisted for many years because he was called a socialist.
Feel Good and the War on Jim Crow should never be in the same sentence.