The Help (2011)
Storyline
Aibileen Clark is a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children and has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson is an African-American maid who has often offended her employers despite her family's struggles with money and her desperate need for jobs; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a young white woman who has recently moved back home after graduating college to find out her childhood maid has mysteriously disappeared. These three stories intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around "the help"; yet they are always kept at a certain distance because of racial lines.
Directors
Cast
Bryce Dallas Howard, Emma Stone, Sissy Spacek, Mike Vogel, Allison Janney, Dana Ivey, Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, Shane McRae, David Oyelowo, Jessica Chastain, Chris Lowell, Ahna O'Reilly, Anna Camp, Cicely Tyson, Aunjanue Ellis, LaChanze, Brian Kerwin, Wes Chatham, Ted Welch, Roslyn Ruff, Tarra Riggs, Leslie Jordan, Mary Steenburgen, Tiffany Brouwer, Carol Sutton, Ashley Johnson, Ritchie Montgomery, Nelsan Ellis, Cleta Elaine Ellington, Amy Beckwith, Julie Ann Doan, Lamar Lott, Charles Orr
Trailer
Reviews
88
Orlando Sentinel
Davis and Spencer give faces and fully-fleshed out lives to women who must have been more than what they did for a living as The Help.
88
A deeply touching human story filled with humor and heartbreak is rare in any movie season, especially summer. That's what makes The Help an exhilarating gift.
80
Variety
A stirring black-empowerment tale aimed squarely at white audiences, The Help personalizes the civil rights movement through the testimony of domestic servants working in Jackson, Miss., circa 1963.
75
Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material.
70
The New Yorker
The Help is, in some way, crude and obvious, but it opens up a broad new swath of experience on the screen, and parts of it are so moving and well acted that any objections to what's second-rate seem to matter less as the movie goes on. [15 & 22 August 2011, p. 96]
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