The Help (2011)

First off, I think it is very challenging to successfully adapt a popular book to the screen. This is particularly challenging when the novel has a high emotional content, because there are so many more ways to demonstrate that in written form than in film--and this movie is an excellent adaption of the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett. The book revolves around the lives of African-American's in the South at the dawning of the Civil Rights movement. Racism is considered normal--it is so rare to be treated equally that when it happens there is profound distrust of the situation. When will this blow up all over me is on the tip of the tongue of every black person treated with decency. That is a bad bad situation, and the film doesn't lay it on too thick, but it is in every scene. The novel and the movie focus primarily on the day to day lives of domestic help. Maids are routinely talked about as if they are not there, treated like they are indentured servants, and as if they have no ambitions beyond their current demeaning jobs. When a maid is fired for using the indoor bathroom rather than going out in the middle of hurricane strength gales it is not unsurprising. The South in 1960 was that bad, the movie states. The stories of these women, what it feels like to be them, is a story told by a young white woman, and it is potent stuff. Medgar Evers is killed in the middle of the book (which happened June 12, 1963), and this is a tipping phenomenon. Women who were too afraid to tell their stories started pouring them out, and because civil rights was in the national news, what these maids had to say was newsworthy. Despite what sounds like it would be a complete downer of a movie, it is really very uplifting, and not just because the maids got mad, and they got even. The actresses who portray the maids do a fantastic job of making lemonade out of lemons, supporting each other, and enjoying life despite all the negatives they are surrounded by.