‘The Help’ speak out!

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“The Help,” written and directed by Tate Taylor from Katherine Stockett’s novel, starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, and Bryce Dallas Howard. W they end up treating the maids hen girls become housewives who raised them with the same mean oppressiveness their mothers once did. In Tate Taylor’s film, “The Help,” from Katherine Stockett’s eponymous novel, set in the early 1960s during the civil rights era (the book takes place a decade later), white mothers in Jackson, Miss., who drive around in Cadillac convertibles with the top down, want to protect their children from diseases that “colored” people allegedly carry (“they have different diseases than us”).

Power housewife, take-no-prisoners Hilly Holbrook (a two-dimensional character played by Bryce Dallas Howard) gets a law passed barring maids from their employers’ bathrooms, relegating them to bare, plywood “outhouses” in the garage. The irony is that the “help” feed, dress, potty train, diaper, and doctor the children, and often go an extra step by comforting them with warm hugs and soft words.

Black maids are ciphers in these households—seen but not heard. Not to speak unless spoken to. The daughters of maids become maids themselves, with their mothers advising them of the do’s and don’ts of working for whites.

Sissy Spacek, in cat’s-eye glasses, plays Missus Walters, Hilly’s Alzheimerstricken mother. Hilly’s maid—seen-itall, humorous Minnie (a terrific Octavia Spencer)—had raised Hilly. Nevertheless, when Hilly fires Minnie, Missus Walters is outraged. For a maid to be fired from a family for whom she’s worked for generations is shameful, always the maid’s fault; they are sometimes beaten by their husbands for losing their jobs.

Eugenia “Skeeter” (believably played by Emma Stone) a New York college grad, returns to Jackson to care for her ailing mother, Charlotte (Allison Janney). In distinct contrast to her friends’ crinoline skirts, floral dresses, and bouffant hair-dos, Skeeter wears plain cotton dresses or simple two piece suits. Her hair is wild and unruly; she wears little make-up. The family’s maid, Constantine (a magical Cicely Tyson), who’d raised her, is gone. Charlotte refuses to explain. Later in the film the ugly truth behind her dismissal is revealed. Director Taylor shows flashbacks of Skeeter and Constantine, with Constantine waxing philosophical and Biblical, like an ancient sage.

Aibileen, played by Viola Davis, is the maid for one of Hilly’s close friends, and a fully developed character. Aibileen elevates the film beyond cliché. She inspires Skeeter, who got a job at a local newspaper, to write articles from a “colored” maid’s point of view about working for white employers. These articles, many of which Aibileen dictates, are to be included in a book that Skeeter is writing.

Director Taylor includes scenes that make whites feel comfortable with racial oppression, thinking that things can’t be too bad because Blacks merely laugh at themselves: For instance, Aibileen tells about being asked by a white child why her skin is that color; she says, “I’m Black because I drink too much coffee.”

Jessica Chastain (the oppressed, marSal Mastriano / Socialist Action tyrized wife of Brad Pitt in “Tree of Life”) plays Celia. Her character illustrates the social prejudices among whites, which broadens the film’s scope. Celia is as refreshing as the bottle of Coke she offers Minnie when hiring her. Hilly and her housewife friends had tossed Celia into the white trash bin.

It was nice that her husband, Johnny (Michael Vogel), was not portrayed as the stereotypical rich, white Southerner, but as a man who truly loves his wife, the only man who had a real presence. Celia becomes an excellent cook thanks to Minnie, who ends up being treated as an equal in their household. Unfortunately, this is more of a fantasy than reality, although maybe a rare occurrence.

A ring found behind a couch that hasn’t been moved for a half-century results in Hilly’s new maid being arrested, handcuffed, and beaten bloody by cops in front of her friends. The murder of Medgar Evers terrifies them and Black communities across the South. Yet this news and other reported atrocities are instrumental in inspiring all the Black maids in the neighborhood to step up and offer their life stories for Skeeter’s book.

After the book is published, and against the background of the civil rights movement, Aibileen says that for the first time, “I felt free.” Unfortunately, little has changed in the “help” department in the last half-century. Rich white people still get help, but not merely from Blacks. Now it’s provided by female immigrants from all over the world, who are often raped, beaten, and locked into basement rooms—literally slaves. More media attention needs to be brought to this escalating atrocity, which will only worsen as the income gap continues to widen. n