The Help” is a 2011 American period drama film directed and written by Tate Taylor. The film stars Jessica Chastain, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Allison Janney, Octavia Spencer and Emma Stone. “The Help” is an American story about three women who take risk in writing a novel based on the stories from the view of black maids.
The main idea of the film is to show the African American maids’ point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis. This film is about Skeeter who is 21 years old who returns to a quite town and wants to become a journalist. Successfully she gets a job as a columnist for the local paper. Her mother only concern about to find a husband for Skeeter. Aibileen also works as a maid for a family, she worked as a nanny all her life and raised 17 children, but she one of her sons. Minny is another servant, she raises children of her own, but sometimes she can be really rough and cheeky.
Blacks in this film represented as slaves for rich and successful people. The film shows the inequality of black and white people, restriction of rights of colored people, the poverty that touched a huge number of population. Three maids start to write stories of lives from their own point of view. Those days in Mississippi laws and a freedom of speech were restricted and it was illegal to express your opinion and publish it in a publishing house. The movie shows racism several times.
For example, when Aibileen was in the bathroom and it was built specially for her and a white lady said that black people have different diseases than white people. Also it shows several scenes when the maids travel on buses, white people were always at front, while black people were at the back of the bus. Hospitals, shops, toilets, shells and even water – everything was separated for white and colored people. The maids were unappreciated by white and rich employers. They had small salaries, bad conditions, they had to do a lot of work and be really kind with their employers. It was a real disrespect in the manner they were treated.
The racism in society led to the segregation of the Blacks and White. For Black people amenities were set aside and they were different and worse than for White people. For example: one character in the movie tried to prevent using toilets which were inside the houses, instead of this they built toilets outside of the houses. The main purpose of the segregation was to separate Blacks and Whites, because the colored were said that they have diseases.
