It’s 1963 in Jackson, Miss., and Aibileen and Minny, two black maids, join Skeeter, a young, white aspiring writer fresh out of Ole Miss, to tell the long-repressed stories of domestics who have cleaned house, cooked and raised the children of rich white women in that old Southern town.
Spencer, a prolific film and TV actress, plays Minny, an outspoken domestic who is raising a brood of her own kids, warding off an abusive husband and shouldering the demands of her employers, along with their often humiliating words and actions.
The critically acclaimed novel on which the movie is based has been astoundingly successful since its 2009 publication. It reached the No. 1 position on the New York Times bestsellers list, where it has been included for about
two dozen consecutive weeks. On Amazon.com, the book took the No. 1 and No. 2 spots in historical fiction and literary fiction, respectively.
Viola Davis as the determined housekeeper Aibileen in the cinematic version of Stockett's novel, I am persuaded, that, yes, Skeeter, a recent college graduate raised by her family's maid, has a claim to the story, too. Initially, I was angered by this young white woman's seeming appropriation of the maids' stories. But no more.
And, in the movie, the sound of the South rolls from the mouths of both white and black women, taking away another of my objections to the book. (It grated for me to read the black housekeepers speaking in a way-down-South patois, with no drawl or dialect from the white women.)
By telling the film version of Stockett's story of four black maids and the hateful white, Mississippi women for whom they work, Dreamworks Studios and director Tate Taylor highlight the slow change that bore some fruit in the U.S. in the early '60s - even in Mississippi. The civil rights struggle is a backdrop to this story.
KNOWING THEM
My personal experience parallels it in many ways, and I grew up in North Carolina knowing intimately the Aibileens, Constantines and Minnys that people it. They were my aunts and my neighbors and the women with whom I attended church. I watched each morning as they waited for the bus that would take them far away from their own homes. They were the ones who worked hard during the week and beyond, shook their heads at how "nasty" their particular white people could be, and prayed - yes, Lord - on Sunday for a way out and a way up.
And, yes, some of those women came to love some of the white charges they were pitifully paid to care for. To suggest otherwise, as have some black women with whom I have spoken, would deny the essential humanity of black women whose capacity to love is assuredly intact. Some of the film's most poignant scenes are those in which Aibileen works to instill a sense of worth in Mae Mobley, a white toddler whose mother ignores her.
Aibileen knew that she was somebody and that her job did not define her and was working to pass along that knowledge. This is made-for-TV, pull-out-the-lace-hankie stuff, for sure, but it is also real.
Happily, the serious trumps the sappy. A fine cast makes "The Help" a message-bearing vehicle that only occasionally veers toward the maudlin.
The film is a story of conflict, but more important, of courage. Especially of the sort that shows what can happen when just one person steps away from the crowd. Aibileen was such a person, as was the gutsy, outspoken Minny, played by Octavia Spencer. And surely, it took a special kind of valor to pull Skeeter away from her high-society cohorts to even suggest the writing project on which the movie and the book turn.
No comments:
Post a Comment