Stone expresses admiration for 'Help' star Viola Davis

That’s the writing advice given to Skeeter, the only single white female and college graduate among her well-to-do white girlfriends who are all married with children. In the small town of Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, Skeeter reaches out to the African American maids of her so-called friends to speak her truth.
The truth is, one of Skeeter’s best friends, Hilly (a professing Christian and wife of a politician), is a high-minded and demoralizing individual who thinks it is perfectly normal to host a fundraiser for the “Poor Starving Children of Africa” and yet draft an initiative to require that all white families build separate bathrooms for their “help”; in Hilly’s words, “They have separate diseases than we do, and I’m just trying to protect our children.”


The help of which Hilly speaks are the African American maids and lead characters Aibileen and Minny, who spend their entire lives cooking food for white families, cleaning their homes, and looking after their white babies. Hilly is the one who spews the venom of lies and hatred that causes racism to persist. Skeeter and the rejected “white trash” Celia Foote are the bridge builders who take the risk to enter into relationships with the maids and get to know them as people.


Like many other African American women, I was a little apprehensive about reading a book and then going to yet another movie where black people are depicted as victims who need rescuing from the good white folk. Hollywood has followed that tag line with movies like The Blind Side, Save the Last Dance, Amistad, and Radio to name a few. Of course, African American women are equally unexcited about Hollywood’s depiction of yet another maid or “mammy” role.


But this story is different. The Help, Kathryn Stockett's bestseller, which just debuted in theaters yesterday, is a story about truth, courage, and forgiveness. This is a story about womanhood, friendship, and love.


The truth is those times were hard. That’s what I understand, not from what I have seen in a movie or read in a book, but from the stories of my own mother, the women in my family, my godmothers, and countless mentors who lived during that time. Racism is ugly. Racism is sinful and still plagues our society. It takes courage to admit and then wrestle with that statement.


You are about to experience one of the best movies of 2011 so far. "The Help" is an adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's novel about African-American maids working in white households in Jackson, Miss., circa 1962.


It was a silent world of servitude; cooking, cleaning and child-rearing for rich white employers in exchange for little pay and often, even less dignity and respect. Viola Davis is the central figure who courageously tells her story to a young writer, played by Emma Stone, with whom I spoke recently.


There hasn't been much from that side. It's such a little microcosm that we show. I mean, we're only meeting a couple characters like that throughout this book. It's not speaking for all of Jackson, Miss., or saying that everyone was like that.


Isn't she from a different planet? I've been lucky enough to work with some really wonderful actors in the few years that I've gotten to work, and I'm always trying to learn and grow from each one. One day I was sitting and watching Viola and I realized that there's nothing I can learn from her because she's just on a different planet entirely. She's just operating from somewhere else and that's both disheartening as an actor that wants to learn, and incredibly satisfying and amazing as an audience member. … Yeah, she's unbelievable in this movie.