Movie Review: the Help Essay

Kathryn Stockett’s, The Help, introduces two main characters in the novel who reveal their drastic experiences of the day-to-day life of an African American during the early 1960’s. These hard working ladies, Aibileen Clark and Minny, dedicate and spend their lives taking care of white families and raising their innocent children. Discrimination played a big role in the society during this era, and was considered normal; however, these tough and independent women took every day as a new challenge to look for the the best outcome. In the novel, Kathryn Stockett interprets nature imagery to symbolize the traumatic experiences and struggles each black minority undergoes.

The Help is an inspiring movie, centralized on themes of showing courage in the midst of adversity and racial desegregation. The selection of actors with specific attributes, lighting/camera angles, and music, allows the movie to entertain in detail, and highlight the prime issues of the 1960s. With the movie being directed with these specifities in mind, the author, Kathryn Stockett, is able to successfully relay her message in the screenplay.

The Help, in light of the top of the selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, is a movie about segregation in Jackson, Mississippi in the mid-1960s. the work clarifies, African-American ladies had couple of alternatives yet to work as abused domestics for affluent white families. While socialites endowed the bringing up of their youngsters to the house keepers, the last were scarcely ready to tend to their own particular families. And this happen after the united states Civil War.

“‘Don’t you ever wish you could change things?”’ (10). In Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960’s, woman ahead of her time, Miss Skeeter, proposes an idea to write a book about the lives of colored maids in Jackson. Aibileen and Minny, two maids, are among the first ones to agree to help Skeeter, despite the potential danger to themselves. In The Help, Kathryn Stockett creates an engaging and immersive world that explores racism and social injustice by using well-developed writing, the ideal amount of imagery, and strong characters.

She works for Elizabeth, an affluent white woman who is pregnant with her second child, even as she neglects her first child. Aibileen is the liaison between Skeeter, Elizabeth’s best friend, and the other maids.

The movie, The Help, is full of social issues, the largest of which is obviously racism, followed by that of sexism of both men and women, classism of both genders and races and even mentions of ageism with certain characters.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett gave everyone insight to the life of an African American woman in the early 1960s. The Help criticized racial inequality, and gives society an insider's view of segregation and fear of the status quo in their own race. Throughout the 1960s many African American woman worked in housekeeping. The novel follows the lives of three maids who are have a book wrote from their point of view. The story follows them as they go through the struggles of life and how stressful writing the book is on them because of time period and how dangerous it was to be seen with a person of the different race if you weren't working for them. Being seen with a person of the different race could get you labeled or worse thrown in jail for an integration violation.

The Help (2011) by Tate Taylor is a film set in 1962 Mississippi, which portrays issues of racism and discrimination in the small town of Jackson. Hilly Holbrook (Miss Hilly), a Southern white character, views African-Americans as people who are lazy, dirty, diseased, and are in general less intelligent and less valuable than Southern whites. She enforces the need for segregation and punishes anyone who disagrees. Miss Hilly's perspective of African Americans is a representation of the dominant perspective in the society of Jackson, Mississippi 1962. The "help" referred to the African-Americans who were considered to be low class, if they were considered to be a part of society at all. Miss Hillys’ perspective reflects the harsh stereotype

A Tate Taylor film, The Help (2009) emphasizes the extreme, racially-charged stereotypes thus endorses racial thinking. Blacks in this film are represented broadly as common house maids, or domestic slaves, but specifically as oppressed, unhappy, impoverished, and products of hardship through the utilization of racist stereotypes and juxtaposition with the lives of affluent whites in the southern United States, a juxtaposition which immortalizes the racial gap between whites and blacks.

The movie “The Help” was based In the early 1960’s in Jackson, Mississippi. During this period of time it was very segregated, very much so that whites did not want African Americans to have contact with them, but were expected to fully take care of their children from birth to adulthood. Most of the African American maids later developed a strong bond with the children that they looked after. They tried teaching the kids to see no color, just to later witness them grow up to be brainwashed by the world to think of African Americans as less than. Except for one southern girl named Skeeter Phelan, who saw the equality in everyone. And one day she decided to interview the maids to get their perspectives on life and to get their story out to the world. At first the maids were hesitant because it would be serious consequences if anyone knew who exactly spoke up, but Skeeter did whatever she could to make sure all the maids were anonymous and no one knew. She risked many hardships like losing her relationship with her boyfriend and also building tension with the women of the Junior League. Successfully the maids stories got out and it opened eyes little by little.

The film “The Help” (2011), is a story based on the daily lives of prominent white women and the relationships with their African-American housemaids in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 1960s Civil Rights movement in America. A well-to-do white woman and central character in this film, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, aspires to be a journalist and decides to write and publish an exposé of the stories of the housemaids in Jackson to achieve this goal, however, only two maids, Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson are willing to discuss their experiences with her. The other maid’s in Jackson resist telling Skeeter their stories, fearing the punishments they would endure if the authorities were to find out. In spite of this, after the malicious arrest of one of their befriended maids, all of the maids begin to share their experiences, which consist of racial hostility and being treated as intrinsically subservient to white people. The story Skeeter publishes entitled The Help, creates a disturbance among the white families in Jackson, by exposing the racism the maids are faced with, forcing the white families to reflect upon how they have treated their maids. The storyline represented in The Help exhibits examples of the primordial approach to race and ethnicity, as well as numerous sociological concepts including segregation, internalized oppression, and white privilege, which will be exemplified in this paper in order to uncover the race relations evident within this film.

The movie, The Help, is based on the book written by Kathryn Stockett. It was released in 2011 and directed by Tate Taylor (Taylor, 2017). The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960’s, and it is about the experiences black women had as maids for white families. These women decided to risk it all and tell their stories in an effort to show what is was really like for them (Taylor, 2011). The Help illustrates how these women fought racism and prejudice by becoming unified with one another. This paper will address how prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and inequality affect the characters and their relationships in the story.

Society has changed and evolved throughout time. Perhaps one of the most significant changed in contemporary American society is the treatment towards African Americans. “The Help” a feature film directed by Tate Taylor is based on the non-fictional novel “The Help” written by author Kathryn Sockett. The feature film explores the life of African American maids of Jackson Mississippi, in the early 1960’s. The 1960’s displayed all African Americans to being left out of the “American dream” through neglect and racism. African Americans faced prejudice and discrimination in almost every aspect of their life, from jobs to housing and even their education. They were denied the right to sit at the same lunch counter or use the same public rest

Although the maids were struggling and going through a difficult time in 1960’s, The Help portrays that their family members were too. Segregated society against the backdrop of the growing US civil rights movement in the 1960’s has an impacted. “Race also determines who has access to educational, occupational, and economic opportunity. Racial tensions are high as white community members employ violence and coercion to try to keep the Civil Rights Movement from sweeping into their Mississippi town” (Shmoop Editorial Team). The white community in the movie continue to keep the black women as their servants throughout their lives. As Skeeter the white lady, who writes a book about The Help and portrays through the book that the African American women go through. As the white women of Jackson, Mississippi read the book they began to act more violent to the black women. The book is away as the black women to make a statement about the civil rights they have.

The movie The Help is based off of the beloved book by Kathryn Stockett, The Help. The film is a drama taking place in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 1960s. Lead actresses include Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Jessica Chastain, and Octavia Spencer.