Unavoidable this week: everybody going coo-coo-bananas about “The Help,” which opened in theaters last night. “The Help” is based on Kathryn Stockett’s novel of the same title, which tells the story of Skeeter, a young white woman who gets a job writing for her local newspaper in a small Mississippi town, and Aibileen, a black maid who works for one of Skeeter’s childhood friends. Skeeter returned from college to find all the friends she grew up with are married with children and employers to black “help,” who are second-class citizens in 1960′s Jackson, Mississippi. The story follows Skeeter as she interviews Aibileen and other black maids for a secret book project that exposes the ugly day-to-day racism in Jackson’s domestic life to the rest of the world.
Some critics, both armchair and professional, say the new flick starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Allison Janney is a white-washed, even racist version of the civil rights movement that praises a white woman as the savior of the poor black folks. (Cough “The Blind Side” cough.) They ask why Hollywood makes films about civil rights through the lens of white people, instead of giving due credit to the African-Americans who fought for their rights. And that is certainly a worthy question to ask.
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