And cried for the entire two hours and seventeen minutes.
I sobbed out loud and I wasn't the only one crying.
I went with my teenage daughter, who is a tough little cookie, and she was also crying.
(Which should say a whole lot more because I am a regular watering pot. I will cry if I even suspect that someone wants to cry. My grandma always joked that my tears flow like May showers because I was born in that month. But I digress...)
The Help purports to tell the story of life during the sixties for high society whites and their black maids. It sells itself as an unlikely friendship between a young, white journalist and two maids.
The Help is a 2011 comedy-drama film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's 2009 novel of the same name about a young white woman, Skeeter Phelan, and her relationship with two black maids during Civil Rights era America in early 1960s. The film is Tate Taylor's directorial debut, and stars Emma Stone, Mike Vogel, Bryce Dallas Howard, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, and Allison Janney
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I was reluctant to see this new offering as for one, I had not read the book, and two, I am just so tired of Hollywood's obsession with white do-gooders rescuing hapless blacks.
But, I am one of the luckiest mothers alive as my daughter still thinks it is cool to hang with mom and so when she refused to see the movie with friends, preferring to see it with me, well then, I am a goer.
I sat down to watch and immediately became grumpy. The two previews I saw were of Gabourey Sidibe playing a maid and Eddie Murphy playing a thief. This is not good, I thought to myself. Movie started and the very first scene had me crying and ready to go home. "I am not subjecting myself to this," I fumed to my daughter. "Mom please," she begged me.
And so I sat. And watched.
I will not go into the details of the movie as I would strongly urge you to see it yourself.
Especially because of some of the debates we have been having on this very site.
There are some in the black community who are furious about this movie and its portrayal of black people. Count among them,
Melissa Harris-Perry who argues that:
“This is not a movie about the lives of black women,” she clarified, as their lives were not, she argued, “Real Housewives of Jackson, Mississippi… it was rape, it was lynching, it was the burning of communities.” She then explained that it was, to her, completing the work started by the Daughters of the American Confederacy when they “found money in the federal budget to erect a granite statue of Mammy in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial,” which happened while the same Senate contingency failed to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. “It is the same notion that the fidelity of black women domestics is more important than the realities of the lives, the pain, the anguish, the rape that they experienced.”
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I don't know that I completely agree with Ms. Harris as I am a bit reluctant to give all that power to a movie and or a book. Too, no one piece of cinematic work will ever be able to capture the depth of what happened - and continues to happen - to the oppressed people of the time.
But I do agree with Ms Harris-Perry that it was bittersweet watching the brilliant and beautiful, Viola Davis, once again playing a maid. She was powerful. As was
Octavia Spencer who was also a maid. These two ladies deserve Oscar nominations and i for one will be watching to see whether they get nominated.
Ironically, one of the positive take-aways, is that, at least at the theater we went, it was a very mixed crowd. Matter-of-fact, it was a packed house with about two thirds white.
And at the end of the movie I saw white people with tears running down their cheeks.
I was heartened by the experience.
Have you seen The Help?
What did you think of it?
Update: There is a very brutal review of the book and movie to be found here
You can find first hand accounts of real maids working during that era at Speaking For Ourselves: We don't need any "Help."