The Help

Cecil says: The best film I've seen in 2011. In fact I've now seen it twice (once on my travels in America and now this weekend in Stockton's great little art centre) and I haven't seen any film twice since The King's Speech about this time last year.

This is the story of the black women who worked as domestic helps for the white middle classes in early 1960s Mississippi. Actually, it's also a portrayal of the imposed conformity hanging over the Stepford Wives types on the white side of the fence. But there are also great observations on individual relationships that develop within and across these two main stories.

I guess I'm biased because I have just come back from a visit to Mississippi and Alabama. In Mississippi, I had the good fortune to meet a woman who was herself a 'help' until just a few years ago, but is now living her dream by running her own restaurant in Aberdeen, just a few miles from where this film is set.

In Alabama, I visited Montgomery, where the civil rights movement was born, where the white bus drivers in the 1950s and 60s were really as bad as they come across in this film; and where some white people's views are just as discriminatory as they were portrayed in The Help.

So the film had a very real resonance for me, even though it's set almost 50 years ago.

It's wonderfully well acted all the way through. There aren't many familiar faces, either (Allison Janney - who played CJ in West Wing - and Sissy Spacek really being the only actors I recognised), but the performances across the board are fantastic, from Viola Davis (playing Aibileen), through Emma Stone (Skeeter) and Octavia Spencer (Minny) to little Eleanor Henry, who plays the poor, unloved 3-year-old Mae.

The story lines are strong, the dialogue quick-witted and complex enough (with the accents) for me actually to want to see this film a 3rd time (and I haven't done that since Jules et Jim), and enough social comment to leave you thinking about things on many many levels: relationships, society, race, gender...I could go on, but I'd just say: go and see it for yourself...

*****

Bea says: I had heard so much about this film, not only from Cecil (as he saw it alone, before I did), but also had heard part of the book serialised on Woman's Hour, and many reviews and discussions. So I was prepared for the story, and the topic and it did not sweep me away with emotion quite as it did Cecil, who came to it completely unprepared.

Like Cecil, I mostly appreciated the aspect of the film that is about telling the stories of people whose stories are less told, and indeed whose lives and thoughts are rarely enquired into - a very powerful part of this story and film indeed. The transformative nature of this kind of storytelling is clearly rendered in the film, and the scenes just preceding the closing credits are incredibly moving because of this.

The film made me - now nearly 6 months back from DC - feel nostalgic and almost homesick for the USA, although the USA I lived in is nothing like the South of the 1960s. After the film, Cecil and I mused on the iconic nature of bus travel in the USA; an important part of the civil rights movement, and a big part of our US experience too (athough perhaps not so much for most middle Americans these days). The growing sense of change of the 1960s is almost palpable in the film, and even though I wasn't born the era is so well known through film and literature that it felt recognisable to me too.

There were things I didn't like as much about this film too - it felt a little cliched at times, all the maids were good, hearty people, all the white employers were unfulfilled, repressed and unhappy. I am not sure if the book deals more in the shades of grey of human life than the film did - but I will find out, as I plan to read it now I have finally seen the film.
***