The Help

A couple of years ago, Pat Stallins suggested that I read a book entitled "The Help." Knowing that I am an avid reader, she knew that I would love the characters and the storyline, and she also knew that I would love "casting" the movie, which is one of my favorite games. As I read through a particularly appealing book, I challenge myself to select an actor to fill all the book's roles. I loved "The Help," but I couldn't decide who would play each part. I chose Cloris Leachman as the elderly Miss Walter, who was feisty and pretty much deaf as a post, but I was drawing a blank on most of the other roles.

Fortunately for me, someone else made all those decisions, and this past month, "The Help" was released as a major motion picture. Whoever did the casting did an abslutely wonderful job. Emma Stone played "Skeeter," one of the three main characters in the book. The other two main characters, Minnie and Aibileen, were played by actresses I do not know, but they captured the spirits of those women just perfectly. All the other characters came to life beautifully as well, and for only the fourth or fifth time, I can truly say that I enjoyed the movie just as much as I did the book. The plot line was tinkered with just a little, and that tinkering didn't hurt at all, as the movie followed the book just fine.

In fact, parts of the movie were actually better than the book in that visual depictions of certain events evoked much more emotional reactions that simply reading about them. For instance, one of the story lines revolved around an insistence that the black servants in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s have a bathroom separate from the homeowner's. While I thought about this particular indignity when I read it, I reacted much more viscerally when I saw the maid having to go to the bathroom in the garage where there was no air conditioning. The look of humiliation on the maid's face as she was interrupted when taking part in one of life's most private functions caused my blood to boil: First, she was told to use a bathroom out in the garage, and second, she wasn't allowed to do so with even a modicum of privacy! I thought, "Is NOTHING sacred?!"

The screenwriter also decided to make one character a little more likeable than she was in the book, and while that was not as I would have preferred, I did not protest when her relationship with her daughter was salvaged for a "feel-good" ending.

All in all, I think this movie has "legs" akin to those developed by The Blind Side: people continue to talk about it, and people will continue to go see it based on that word of mouth. Sandra Bullock benefited from that kind of buzz, and I think that The Help will as well. I think people will report about how they were affected and touched by the tale of the strength of some women in the South in the age of Civil Rights.