Discrimination

            African-Americans went through extreme hardships during the Civil Rights Movement, however The Help failed to capture the in-depth experience of what black maids went through. The Help was a feel-good movie but that meant that the movie seemed to trivialize the experiences of black maids in the '60s. However the performance of Viola Davis as Aibileen and Octavia Spencer as Minny did steal the show. Davis gave a heartfelt performance as the maid who was conflicted on whether to speak out on the injustice that the black maids suffered but in the end, had enough strength to write about experiences and choosing not to go back to her job as a maid. Spencer played a sassy, loud-mouthed maid who is also Aibileen's best friend. What stood out to me about Spencer's acting was her versatility. Her character was also suffering from abuse at home from her husband. I found her scenes poignant and touching. Spencer was able to seamlessly be the abused and broken wife but then also be the headstrong and independent maid. She was also comedic and merely her facial expressions would be enough to make me laugh. Minny's character was by far one of the top characters in the film. 

            The tone of the film I felt was very light-hearted. The colors throughout the film were bright and playful colors, like the poster for the movie. I think the reason many brilliant colors were featured in the movie was because they wanted to set the tone and mood as a feel-good movie. Movies during the Civil Rights era such as Selma featured dark colors throughout the movie to set the dark and serious mood of the movie. The music was also quite light-hearted and upbeat during the film. The Help’s tone was to leave us hopeful and happy, but I think that tone sugar-coated the era. The time of Civil Rights was not a happy time due to segregation and lynching. The Help does not seem to feature the dark parts of the ‘60s. I hoped to see more of the individual maids and their frustration being treated unfairly but to me it felt as if the majority of the movie was about Skeeter trying to get stories from the maids simply to write a book but did not really go into depth what the individual maids were going through. Maybe part of it was that the novel and the film were written by white people, Kathryn Stockett and Tate Stevens. I think that by writing a story about racism during that era and capturing the pain and hardships that African-Americans went through at that time, a story like that should be written by a person who identifies with that pain.

          The Help failed to accurately capture the painful experience of what it was like to be black in the Civil Rights era, most likely due to the novel and the film being written by white people. It doesn’t seem possible to truly write and capture that experience of a black person when you don’t know what it’s like. The light-hearted tone of the film was not effective to precisely portray the racist time of the ‘60s. You cannot write a point of view of a black person simply through observation and assumption. I think if the movie was directed and written by a black person, who closely identifies with the experience of racism, the movie would have reached out and touched the audience.