There are certain movies made every year which I believe exists just for the sole purpose of reminding everyone how bad slavery was and how bad it was pre the civil rights movement. While I’m not saying that these historical events/facts are something that I’m willing to dismiss, but at the same time the way that most of these movies handle the existence of this fact tend to be so ham-fisted that it makes the overall message of the film completely defeated and just becomes an exercise in trying to make white people of today feel bad for what was done to the African-Americans of yesteryear. This film, while definitely has that overbearing nature to the period, I feel takes such a different point of view of the time that it manages to work.
As a man whose family had help employed to his home for most of my childhood I can see where this movie is coming from and at the same time not quite understand the hatred that existed. You’d think that employing black maids to raise white babies would be the first step in breaking down the barriers of white and black. Not with the racist mothers and fathers but through the next generation of white people.
I’ve always said that people are stupid but a person is smart. How can a person, this child, who’s raised by this black woman and come to be their best friend at times the moment that they’re old enough to do everything themselves just turn around and spit on everything the help has done for them by being just as ignorant and insensitive as their previous generation? Wouldn’t you know that the colour of their skin, at the very least for that individual person, doesn’t matter? Or is that just the fault of the film for not properly explaining how these children’s minds were polluted with lies to keep the segregation going from generation to generation? Probably.
Regardless of that, what I did love about this movie – besides how fantastic Viola Davis was – was how wonderful it was to hear this same story told through a different perspective. In most stories from this period in time it’s always told with the blacks kept at a certain distance and a lot more hatred from the black community. Here however that distance isn’t physical, but more social and psychological, and the hatred is very subtle mainly due to how much these women do genuinely care for the children of their employers. Some you may say a little too much.
When the film opens with Skeeter (Emma Stone) interviewing Abileen (Viola Davis) and she eventually asks the question of “How do you feel to be raising somebody else’s child while you know that someone back home is raising your own?” I think is when I came to realise how crazy the whole idea of a maid is. You even start to think as to when the progression of maids taking care of maids’ children ends. You’re basically paying a woman, a stranger that you even hate so much that you won’t let her use your own bathroom, into your home to raise your children and clean up after you. It’s an almost unreasonable profession.
Rating: 7.0/10