The Help is on its way

We went to kind of a feel-good movie yesterday, The Help, mostly about race relations in the American South in the fifties and sixties. Good writing and acting, but there was a kind of distance that may have been subjective – I mean, I was there; I lived it, and a lot of the details seemed slightly off. But maybe that's just because I _was_ there, and they weren't filming my particular story.


It was told partly from the black characters' point of view (the "help" of the title), and throughout the movie you had the feeling that the narrative was being shadowed by another movie, which was the same incidents, but as viewed by the white characters. I'm pretty sure that was part of the creators' intent, and it was effective. Because the white characters were just as human, and many of them at least as helpless as the black characters, caught up in the social machinery that moved them from event to event.


The focal point is a well-meaning young white woman who's collecting material from the servants' lives for a book, an exposé, and the dynamic between her innocence and the world-weariness of the older black women she grew up with (as help) is well played. The black actors were especially subtle and good, even though the roles must have been troubling for some of them. I mean, their grandmothers played the same roles, but they weren't acting.

Joe