Movie Review Sample on The Help

📌Category: Entertainment, Musicians
📌Words: 915
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 25 June 2021

Although exciting and entertaining, The Beatles and the moon landing were not the only things of importance happening in the 1960’s. This era was filled with violence, prejudice, and social injustice towards people of color. The film The Help, produced in 2011, was set around the civil rights movement and showcased some of the injustices colored people faced at this time. Taking place in Jackson, Mississippi, the film mainly focuses around three women: two black maids, Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson, and one white aspiring journalist, Skeeter Phelan. The director of The Help, Tate Taylor, had many aspirations when making this film; however, some key aspects, mostly concerning the historical accuracy of the film, fell short. 

Director’s always have high hopes and goals for their films, and this is no expectation. Being from Jackson Mississippi himself, Tate Taylor knew how he wanted the film to look. Even before having funding for the movie, he went and scouted locations for the scenes and knew he wanted it filmed in Greenwood, Mississippi (Eisenberg). Being in the south, this area had the certain style houses and look for the time period, so this is where the film was made rather than in a designed studio set. Another big goal of Taylor’s was to showcase the movie as Aibileen’s story. This is why Olivia Davis’s, the actress that portrays Aibileen, has voice overs explaining her side throughout the movie. Out of all of his hopes for the film, Taylor’s ultimate goal was to create a great film that told the story of the colored maids of the time.

The Help displays both white’s and black’s societal perspectives during the time of segregation in the 1960’s. It does this by guiding the audience through the ups and downs of multiple black maid’s lives and the white women that they work for.  Rather than focusing solely on the well known, big names in the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. for example, the movie shows the average day to day of a society in the south. 

The opening scene of the movie features Skeeter interviewing Aibileen about her life. This kicks off the movie, but the real storyline starts when Skeeter, a white and newly graduated aspiring journalist, comes back from her four years at college. Soon fitting right back in the so-called proper white society, Skeeter goes looking for a job at the newspaper in town. She lands a job as the cleaning column writer. Due to her privileged background, she doesn’t know how to give advice on cleaning; hence, Skeeter asks one of her friends if she could propose some questions to her maid Aibileen. Throughout this process, Skeeter realizes that how her friends are treating their maids and people of color in general is despicable. This leads to Skeeter wanting to commulate the life stories of the maids all over town. This is not so easy especially because it is against the law for the black maids to speak out, so until one of their own is forcefully thrown in jail by her white employer for stealing, Aibileen and Minny are the only maids willing to help. Once the other maids come forward to Skeeter with their stories, she then compiles them all into a book called The Help. The book circulates the town, and because Skeeter gave all the maids aliases for protection, speculations about who they could be referring to is the talk of the town. After the book has been out for a bit, Skeeter is offered a job in New York from the company that published the book. After talking with Aibileen and Minny, she decides to take the job. The maids, especially Aibileen, are now dealing with the repercussions of the book. The last scene of the movie is Aibileen getting fired from her job and having to say goodbye to the sweet little girl she was raising throughout the whole film.

While the movie and the actors themselves received praise and nominations for their roles, the film did not encompass the full extent of what it was like for people of color at this time. For the most part, the movie was light-hearted and told an uplifting story. This is nowhere near what most black people were experiencing at the time. In 1896 the Plessy v. Ferguson was passed therefore legalizing segregation (Shi 878). Jim Crow laws were then set to enforce segregation. While the film did show the separation of housing, restrooms, and more, the true violence and repercussions for some of their actions was not shown. Because of mistakes or actions, sometimes minute, black people were punished at the hands of whites. Of the punishments that blacks faced, organized lynching was the most gruesome (Shi 878). The murder and deaths of people of color were normal to whites at this time. Only showing some of the better repercussions for blacks and not the entirety of what they faced makes this film only somewhat historically accurate. Another critique that the film faces is that the movie’s storyline is carried by what Skeeter, a white woman, does instead of being carried by one of the black maids. She’s the one that comes up with the idea of a book. She brings the black maids together to tell their stories. She is seen as the heroine of the film, and without Skeeter there would be no story to tell. Some have gone as far as to call The Help racist. This film is one of many that has attempted to showcase the realities of society around the time of the Civil Rights Movement but has instead created a facade, which buffers the audience from the true violence, racism, and white privilege of the time (Grossman-Heinze). The Help is a cheery film that has gained a lot of praise; however, the events and actions taken place within the film do not completely show the historical truth.

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