THE STORIES THAT WERE BRUSHED UNDER THE CARPET : "THE HELP"

I have been waiting to see this film for so long… I remember a time when it was the only thing everyone was ever talking about. I try to keep up with current developments and watch the new films AS they come up and not a year later, but I mean, come on… I’m human. I occasionally slip up and this was one of those occasions. When I “ran into it” sometime later, I made it a priority to sit myself down and watch it. This really and truly is one of the most thought-provoking films I have watched in a long time and on SO many levels…  Let me tell you about the story first. Then I’ll tell you what I thought. As it were.

If you were to judge the small town of Jackson, Mississippi, on outside appearances alone back in 1962, you would have nothing but praise for it. Everything and everyone is, ordered, pretty, decent and polite. However, underneath it all, things are neither pretty, nor decent. And I could be talking about the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) in-fighting going on amongst the town’s perfectly groomed ladies, but I am not. I am talking about a group of people who were treated little better than furniture – and sometimes not even that well, “the help”, the coloured women who for years have been looking after the southern families’ every need with little recognition and less than minimum wage.  The situation has been going on like this for so long that no one can even dream of it being any other way, and this is despite the civil rights movement spreading through the country like a wave. But one of the town’s inhabitants has had more than enough. Skeeter has always been considered slightly odd. Never as interested as the other town girls in dating and finding a husband and all these aspirations to become a writer. She has to be content, for now, with writing the cleaning advice column in the local newspaper but she has her eye on bigger things. And she is so fed up with the town’s attitude, she knows what she is going to write about. She is going to interview the maids and give voice to their stories for the whole country to hear. Trouble is, in a small town where racism is rife and the political atmosphere means that her actions could even be considered illegal, this is NOT going to be easy…

I was really excited by this film, not least because I thought it was a real story. Especially since, you know, there is an actual book it was adapted from. Thing is, a bit of research showed me, the book is a work of fiction. I mean, it is and it isn’t. The book “The Help” never existed as such (the character of Skeeter for example is completely fictional) however, this doesn’t mean that the stories it portrays didn’t really happen. It’s just that they had no “up and coming author” to give them a voice.  The film – and the book it was based on I take it – contains two different stories. One of them is your typical story of “coming of age. Small town girl, much bigger and better person than her surroundings, overcomes difficulties and injustices, jets off into the sunset leaving the small town and the small-minded people behind… Yes, we have seen it before. But credit where it’s due, it’s well executed. I like, for example, the take the film has on being single or attached. I mean,  since “getting married” is one of the top requirements of a Jackson belle of the era, it is refreshing to see that Skeeter’s happy ending does not contain a dashing beau almost magicked out of thin air. I mean ok, this is a bit of a spoiler. Because one small slap on the wrist: I like what they did about the boyfriend. I think the way they disposed of him was “clunky”.  I mean yes I get it, but it was possibly an afterthought, tagged on the last day of shooting, I honestly don’t know. Or maybe some of the dialogue got cut… I don’t know I digress. Not least because this is, by no stretch of the imagination, the story that matters.

This is the story of the ladies who suffered years of abuse and ingratitude.  It is the story of entire generations who had to live without, and fight, sometimes with their very lives at stake, for their most basic civil rights. And don’t think, just because it is such a serious matter, it cannot come in a beautiful “presentable” package, because it can. The story itself is quiet and dignified, you can be touched by it as part and parcel of the “coming of age” tale of the perfectly likable Skeeter, or, you can just put Skeeter and the fictional maids to one side and reflect on the real people who in some form or another suffered through this. I think this film is a beautiful way of forcing us to think and talk about a time that is in the past now, and that we may well prefer to just forget. It is an opportunity to reflect on stories that really, really need to be told. I sincerely hope it is an opportunity you take.