So I watched The Help (Spoilers -even though the movie is already rotten)

Yesterday I broke down and watched The Help. Even though I was appalled by the trailer when I first saw it, curiosity got the best of me, and I tried to mentally prepare myself for what I was going to see. Sigh - it's not a bad film. But - it's also not what it should have been. The movie is about a young white female, Skeeter Phelan who decides to write a book about the black housekeepers in Jackson Mississippi during the Civil Rights era. This is strike one. A movie about the oppression of blacks in the south where the only way they can be liberated is by a forward thinking white girl. Why can't they liberate themselves? Oh wait - they did.
This is a white woman's fantasy. I'm not trying to throw any of the many whites under the bus who did in fact help during the Civil Rights era. But this movie is frankly sugar coating a lot of things. It's almost like she made a romantic comedy out of racism. People that lived through it don't think it's funny. I would have given Kathryn Stockett more leeway if she had written a black counterpart to Skeeter, a young black female who desired to be a writer but was forced to work as a maid to help her family. Minnie's daughter would have been perfect. All the blacks in the movie, really are kind of props and bystanders. One of the maids (Minnie) is being physically abused by her husband, you never actually see her husband, she eventually leaves him by the end of the story. But would you like to know how? I shit you not - because a white woman cooks dinner for her.
And I didn't even know Cicily Tyson was in this!!! Cicelyyyyyyyyy----
her daughter also could have been the counterpart to Skeeter's character. None of the maid's are seen having lives outside of intersecting with whites, even though that might have been the point, its not accurate. It doesn't make for a rich character. Skeeter gets a love interest in the movie, none of the black characters do. Men of both races are left to supporting, but there is only one black male character that barely has a few lines in the movie (True Blood's Nelsan Ellis).
And then at the end of the movie Skeeter is given a pass by Abilene and Minnie to live her fabulous mostly non oppressed life in New York, while they continue to work as maids or remain jobless.


Overall The Help teaches us -
1. Blacks won't get any where until a white person Helps them
2. Racism is hilarious when pretty white girls do it (or old white women, see Driving Miss Daisy, who Sissy Spacek must have been channeling), and because eventually (see number 1)
3. Viola Davis is a phenom and it should be a crime she isn't a lead in more films (that aren't oppressive)
4. Hollywood hasn't learned a damn thing