Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer from IMDB THE HELP listing.
I went to see The HELP this weekend, with high expectations, from good word of mouth, (which is usually a bad thing). But, like most viewers, I thoroughly enjoyed the film and the time passed quickly. And it's a long movie.
I noticed that on Rotten Tomatoes, the critics weren't as enthusiastic as the public, although still enthusiastic at 76 percent.
And I wondered why.
So, I read some reviews.
Some critics thought THE HELP movie glossed over the serious subject matter and that the characters were cliche.
Hmm.
Now, I am writing a story about the 1910 era, the era of the Servant Problem. Like this story (based on a book by Tate Taylor with a screenplay by Kathryn Stockett) I am intertwining fact and fiction, the little personal picture with the big public picture.
Threshold Girl is at www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf
I didn't find the characters in THE HELP cliche, either. (Allowing for the fact that the film medium generally deals in cliches.)
If you like a character, care for the character, the character isn't cliche. (And the actors here are some of my favorites... Leslie Jordon (I've just seen him on Boston Legal DVDs) Allison Janney, Mary Steenburgen, Sissy Spacek. But it is Viola Davis's movie - and she'll get an Academy Award nomination for her performance.
This is a chick flick, in that it has mostly female characters. Maybe the white men (young, grim, former Old Miss halfbacks, all re-suited up in business grey) are cliche, but they are incidental to the plot, like the sexy young blond is incidental to the plot in mainstream male-dominated Hollywood movies.
Oddly, the one sexy blond in this film is one of the most likeable characters. (Jessica Chastain)
And the other characters (real women, all shapes and sizes) are all interesting too.
Anyway, The Help's one failing (according to some critics) is why the movie is so popular in the first place. It's a feel good movie despite the heavy duty subject.) The movie doesn't demand that we ask ourselves to figure out 'what has changed' and what hasn't. So as to adjust our own behavior. (According to Nora Ephron movies have no effect on people's actions or moral compasses. It's not that kind of medium.)
The Help story is told through the eyes of a kind, enlightened college girl, who wants to know the MAIDS' point of view, because she is a curious journalist type - and she loved her own nanny.
We are allowed to identify with this young woman.
Yet, few of us are brave and ahead of or time. We are ALL more like the shallow socialites in the film than the gutsy (naive)ambitious journalist. We follow the crowd, because it is safer. We allow injustices to happen, before our eyes, rather than protest and lose the approval of our tribe.We are all doing it right now.
Now more than ever. These are serioius SHEEPLE TIMES. (Unlike the 60's, when half the population was under 25 and the middle class was feeling comfortable and prosperous and so generous in their beliefs.)
To me this The HELP story is about unevolved herd-like men and women (the socialites, who are living out their high school paradigm because they are so sheltered) and the super evolved black maids, who have been there, done that and seen it all... indeed, as maids they have an intimate view of how the other half lives.
These are the one with a real story to tell, yet they have no voice. (The movie ends promising this is changing.)
Some things have changed for African Americans since 1960, for sure. But we still have a caste system in the Western World. We still have people we allow to take care of our children and old people for no money and a patronizing form of recognition from us, their superiors. (Philippinos are 'so good' with old people, they respect them in their culture." I've heard otherwise enlightened people say this.)
And as a recent NYT article (MLK is weeping in his grave) suggested, the black community in the US is not that far ahead after 6 decades, socially speaking. The overflowing jails tell the story. Class-line entrenching laws against commingling in public were merely transformed into draconian drug laws, applied extremely unevenly between whites and visible minorities.
I heard an expert on the BBC claim that these laws were enacted as a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. As in 'NEVER AGAIN" will we let the lower classes rise up.
(Actually, I was asked to write a story from a cleaning women's point of view for Chatelaine about 10 years ago. I found a local woman, a friend, who worked as a cleaning woman in our suburb. I recall she told me that her employers treated her as if she wasn't there, having intimate arguments in front of her. I also recall she was fed up with some of her clients asking her to clean the bathroom with vinegar and soda. Too bad, I don't still have a copy. It wasn't one of my favorite articles. I was commissioned to do it for a special WORK issue.)
A dirty job... Nixon, Dorothy // Chatelaine;Nov2000, Vol. 73 Issue 11, p185
Discusses housecleaning and gives advice for how to manage it. INSETS: Tales from the trenches;Sunday.
