The Help is a emotionally-compelling movie. It has a great message, and though the outcome is predictable, the actors deliver performances. It's an ensemble piece. The film made me laugh, think and even cry.
It starts Emma Stone as Eugenia Skeeter, a college graduate living in Jackson looking for career in writing. She is the film heroine because of her dreams. She inspires people, and she observes things around her, i.e prejudices that inflict upon the help (or coloured domestic helper)
The ladies - Hilly, Mrs. Walters, and Elizabeth Leefolt - are their own coterie, discussing daily gossip and little whispers about their help and the strange diseases they may carry. Skeeter is the black sheep of the group. She stares mirthlessly at the help, not with repulsion but compassion. She talks to Aibileen (Viola Davis, who is so good expressing with her eyes) about divulging her stories working as a maid. Aibileen is at first hesitant. Speaking out could mean a loss of her job or worse - alienation from friends and family. Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), a difficult housemaid, is very outspoken towards her problems and is fairly willing in disclosing her work life.
The Help is Skeeter's story as much as it is Aibileen's and Minny's. These are silenced women allowed to speak, and Skeeter publishes their voice. The Help eventually becomes a book within a film.
It was based on the novel by Kathryn Stockett, which was - thus - a book within a book. The Help is a long movie, but it kind of earns it. Writer/director Tate Taylor uses his minutes to make every character unique in the storyline.
This is a female-dominated plot, and the story is not just a comedy, but it instills in our minds history and fascinating secrets awaiting to be unraveled.
The help are suffocated by the prejudices of society, but the white women are also subdued in how they are bound by social conventions and the obligation of marriage. It's all very interesting.
But most importantly, The Help is endlessly funny, remarkably entertaining, and it hits notes not always meant to uplift. The Help isn't a hard film to disagree with because the issues the film raises are now considered truism. This film is about a time where voices needed to be raised, and were. You feel like you've lived with these characters and, most especially, you enjoyed doing it.
Two thumbs up, 80% for The Help
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