you is kind, you is smart, you is important

Last night I went with some friends to go see The Help.  Some of us have read the book and some hadn’t.  In the end, it didn’t matter.  The movie was as close to perfect as you can get.

1962 was a volatile time in our nation’s history.  So much happened in such a short time and really, it was only the tip of the iceberg, wasn’t it?  The Help takes place in Jackson, Mississippi during that year.  Eugenia (Skeeter) Phelan has returned from college with big dreams of being a journalist.  Of course, no one in her circle of friends takes her seriously.  For them, the most important issues are who is having babies and building separate bathrooms for their colored maids.

The longer Skeeter is home the more she sees that things are just not right.  She' can’t stomach the way the maids are treated, the way blacks all over town are treated and she embarks on a complicated, dangerous journey to try to begin to set things right.  She enlists in the help of Aibileen who is just going through the motions of life since her son died.

The book itself is amazing.  The characters rich and full of life.  Each and every character brings something so important to the story and in some way each one surprises the reader.  And the movie, well the movie is just literature come to life.  Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Emma Stone are so amazing.  Maybe even more so was Bryce Dallas Howard who plays Hilly Holbroock.  She’s so good at being a hateful, awful woman!  I spent most of the movie wanting to punch her in the face.

I wish I could tell you everything about this movie, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.  I want you to read the book, see the movie and laugh and cry just like I did.  While the book and movie deal with a very dark time in U.S. History it also shines like a beacon of hope promising that while things don’t become perfect, they did get better.