Film - The Help

So The Help is the latest film that I'm going to comment on. I have mixed feelings about this one. The Help is set in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi and is the story of a white writer recording the experiences of the African American maids that look after white families in the town of Jackson. This film is based on a book and when I watched it, for some reason I thought that it was based on a true story, i.e. a film documenting the writing of a book that actually exists. This is actually not the case, but I think I enjoyed the film much more thinking that it was. I'll come back to this later on, but finding out that this story was a total fiction written in 2009 by a white American woman makes me re-think my enjoyment of it.

 Trailer

Putting this aside, I thought that this film was excellent. It is very long for this type of film at about two and a half hours, but it doesn't drag at all until the very end, and this is only because of the winding down of the story. The acting in this film is very good, and unsurprisingly many of the actresses were nominated or won awards for their performances. I expected the writer (played by Emma Stone) to be the main character, but she is actually more of a side character with a couple of the maids (notably the characters played by Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer) taking the main spotlight.

Some of the characters are very easy to warm to in this film, while at the same time some are very easy to hate. The white household women are all very prim, proper and bitchy, and treat the black 'help' horrendously. The film highlights the fact that the help look after these women when they are children, love them and care for them while their mothers are busy socialising, and form real bonds with them. Then, as they grow up and have their own children, the black women that took care of them just became 'the help', and in some cases aren't even allowed to use the same toilets as the rest of the house. So the white women are easy to hate in this film. The maids are brilliant. They are funny, sarcastic and full of life and there are loads of funny bits which will have you laughing (and some really shocking bits). But at the same time there are many poignant moments giving plenty of opportunities for tearing up. The maids really love the children they look after, but their mothers seem to have little time for them and scold them unnecessarily. The maids are horrified by this but are powerless to intervene and put these women right. There is also problems in the personal lives of the maids, showing all aspects of their lives, not just their work.

There are some white women that do do right by their maids, most notably the writer and one of the other women in the neighbourhood (played by Jessica Chastain). The relationship between Chastain's character and her maid (played by Spencer) casts a direct comparison to the other bitchy white women, with Chastain's character showing kindness towards her maid, as well as sharing her vulnerability with her. It makes you wonder why all of the women don't behave like this, and because of this Chastain's character is by far my favourite in the film.

My main problem with this film though is the stereotypes it adheres to. Both the black maids and the white women are basically exactly what you would expect. Even the Chastain's character who treats her maid far more kindly does so in a very typically 'story-book' manner, with Stone's writer character feeling like she is on very traditional quest to get the maids' voices heard.  This wouldn't bother me if the story were true, if it was (as I originally thought) a film documenting the true story of how the book was written. As I said, the film is in fact based on a book written in 2009. This kind of takes some of the magic away from it as the story line feels almost predictable.

I haven't read the book so I can't really comment on it, but it does seem a bit of an odd time to write about the Civil Rights movement and the relationship between black maids and their white households. She may have done her research very well, but really what does the author know about living and the maids real experiences during this time? The book has received criticism for adhering to sterotypes in the way that it does. It makes you wonder how true to life this film is and how much it just plays up to the stereotypes we are all familar with.

For me, this takes some of the power out of the film. Yes, the plot line and the acting were excellent and go together to form a brilliant, poignant and funny film but it just seems a bit hollow when I think that it was written so recently and so far away from the actual events of the 60s. 'The Help' is definitely worth a watch, as on the surface it's a great and really enjoyable film, but just don't think too much about how and why it was written!