She is no civil rights pioneer she just wants to write a good book.Īgain she enlists Aibileen’s help: Skeeter wants to interview Aibileen, Minny and a dozen other maids so she can write her book from their perspective. But Skeeter never questions the system itself. Sure, she’s upset that her maid, Constantine (Cicely Tyson), who has worked for her family for 29 years, is not there when she returns from college, and that her own mother (Allison Janney, in the most complex performance of any white actor in the film) is evasive about what happened. We get the sense that Skeeter sees a good story here because it’s never been told, but not that she wants to change race relations in the South. Eventually, though, Skeeter, who wants to become “a serious writer,” is moved by her ambition - not by any extraordinary love of black people - to write a book about the help, about what it’s like to be a black servant in a white home. She’s not bothered enough to strenuously confront them about their racism or to end the friendships.Īnd why should she be? Remember, she has recently graduated from Ole Miss - still lily-white in the early 1960s, when the movie takes place - not NYU or someplace where she might have encountered more progressive racial attitudes or (gasp!) some actual black students. But here’s the thing: Skeeter is only a little bothered by this kind of behavior in Hilly and others in her social circle. Meanwhile, Skeeter becomes a little bothered by the bigotry she notices among her friends, particularly Hilly (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), who vehemently objects to her maid, Minny (Octavia Spencer), using the toilet that she cleans because it’s the same toilet that the white folks use. No one questions this in the movie: not Aibileen, of course, not Skeeter and - disturbingly - not the filmmakers. Though Aibileen is the one answering readers’ questions, Skeeter, who is simply taking dictation, gets the credit, the byline and the paycheck. Of course, Aibileen (played with flawless grace by Viola Davis) gets no credit for the assistance she provides. But, being a privileged white Southerner, she knows nothing about cleaning, so she asks Aibileen, the maid of her friend Elizabeth, to help. Rather than finding herself a good ol’ boy to marry, as all her friends have done, Skeeter gets a job writing a column about cleaning for the local newspaper. Skeeter (played by a sometimes-flat Emma Stone) has just returned to Jackson from four years at the University of Mississippi. The movie’s central character is a young white woman named Skeeter - a clear reference to Scout, Harper Lee’s earnest young heroine in To Kill a Mockingbird. The Help - the Oscar-nominated film adaptation of the best-selling novel by Atlanta author Kathryn Stockett - is a feel-good movie for a cowardly nation.ĭespite its title, the film is not so much about the help - the black maids who kept many white Southern homes running before the civil rights movement gave them broader opportunities - as it is about the white women who employed and sometimes terrorized them. “To our detriment, this is typical of the way in which this nation deals with issues of race.” “This nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate in a truly meaningful way the diverse future it is fated to have,” U.S. ![]() In early 2009, about a month into the Obama administration, the nation’s first African-American attorney general called the United States “a nation of cowards” on matters of race. Valerie Boyd is the author of “Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston” and the forthcoming “Spirits in the Dark: The Untold Story of Black Women in Hollywood.” She teaches journalism at the University of Georgia.
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