Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women--mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends--view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.
As with all movies that are made from books, I go in with apprehension. After living through the Harry Potter movies, I've painfully and slowly learned not to expect all the scenes from the book to be in the movie. This was also true for The Help, but the movie somehow made up for it in its charm and comedy. I loved it, even though some of the funniest parts were not in the book, and it seemed like they very likely could have happened in the story.
The actors were overall phenomenal. I was a bit surprised and disappointed to see that Emma Stone was playing the main character, considering that most of her movies are sloppy comedies and she was horrible on SNL. However, for this being her first real serious role, she did really well, and I actually liked her as Skeeter. Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer were absolutely amazing in the roles of the other two main characters. Bryce Dallas Howard, who played the antagonist Hilly Holbrook, though skinner than described in the novel, was also fantastic. There was a strange moment at the end where I actually felt sorry for her character, and this caught me off guard because it didn't happen in the book. But my favorite character in the movie was Hilly's mother, Mrs. Walters, played by Sissy Spacek. She was ten times more hilarious in the movie than in the book, and she really stole the show.
After all the good acting and amazing scenes, the best part of the movie was really the fashion. Set in the 1960's in the South, my sister and I commented on how much we loved the dresses throughout the whole movie.
And, of course, the cars were amazing too.
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