THE HELP

The Help is a movie based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett (nytimes.com). The movie was produced in 2011 in the USA, and directed by Tate Taylor. The genre is comedy, drama and adaption and the main actors are Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Jessica Chastain, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Ahna O’Reilly, Allison Janney and Anna Camp. (hollywoodreporter.com).

SUMMARY

In the movie the young Skeeter(Emma Stone) just came home from college to spend the summer in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi with her family and friends. She wants to get a job and applies for one in the local newspaper. Her female friends and family members aren’t actually agreeing and understanding in her  quest of becoming a journalist. They keep with the traditional women’s charts of cleaning the house, cooking food, watching the kids and attending female club meetings for the rich “white ladies”. All this with the help of their trusted, black housekeepers. One day, after seeing how awfully and disrespectfully the maids are treated, Skeeter decides to start writing a book with interviews from the maids on how they are treated, and how it is to be a maid. She wants to write a book from their point of view, showing the world what its really like, and that they have their own kids and families as well, but spend their life raising other women’s kids and “taking care” of their house.

SETTING

The Help is set during the “apartheid era” in the 1960’s, well 1963 to be exact (wikipedia.org), in the city if Jackson, Mississippi. The movie is played out over a summer and in the opening scene we find ourselves in a white family’s kitchen and the maid Abelee (Viola Davis) is questioned about her job by a woman we cannot see. This scene also repeats itself later in the movie. That’s when we really get it, and then the whole beginning makes a lot more sense.

THEME

As mention previously, the movie is set during the “apartheid era” an era of racial segretation in the USA. The apartheid era, was an era that lasted until the early 70’s, and even in the early 80’s in some places. The movie is set in Mississippi, one of the southern states which all had strict laws to keep white and black people apart. The black people were meant to serve as house slaves and working for the white people, and even though the only thing making them different was their skin-color, the white people meant that they were worth so much more. In the movie they talk about the “Jim Chrow laws”, and it is during what people call the Jim Chrow era in the 1950’s in the U.S. The Jim Chrow laws where state, and local laws in the USA enacted between the 1965 and 1976. The where ment to work as laws to maintaine a racial segretation in public facilities in southern states in the former Confederacy started in 1890 whit the status “separate but equal “ for the African Americans. (Wikipedia.org)

CONLFICTS

The whole movie is actually about conflicts between the white and the black people during the apartheid. In the movie we also find conflicts between Skeeter and her so called “friends” who are “followers” of  the Jim Chrow laws, to put it in one word; racists. More conflicts appear when Skeeter wants to write her book about the black maid’s lives. Conflicts between the black maids and Skeeter, as well as conflicts between Skeeter’s friends and Skeeter.

MY OPINION

I liked this movie, not only because it’s a so called “chick flick” but because it made an impression on me, even though it is only a movie, and none of the characters and their lives are based on exact happenings, and exact people. However I think that this movie is so well manufactured that it makes you feel like if you were watching a documentary from the 1950’s.

SOURCES:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie/help, The Help

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454029/,Barnepiken

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/movies/the-help-spans-two-worlds-white-and-black-review.html?_r=0,The help film review

http://ndla.no/en/node/10649?fag=42&meny=2488 , How to analyze a film

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/461233/The-Help/overview,The help film review

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws, Jim Chrow laws

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1943_Colored_Waiting_Room_Sign.jpg, Racial Segregation in the United States