ipl-logo

The Help Movie

1369 Words6 Pages

Movie Essay Assignment: The Help (2011)
“The Help” is a movie written by Tate Taylor. It is based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett. The movie is about young white woman, Skeeter, who wants to write about life of black maids. The first maid to contribute to that novel is Aibileen. Later, her friend Minny joins. At that time, black people were organizing a movement (later called African-American Civil Rights movement) that had for a primary goal equality between races. The movie is placed in Jackson, Mississippi. The whole action is intertwined with The Civil Rights Movement.
It all starts with maid talking with someone about her life. After she has been asked about her son, she said that she doesn’t want to talk about it. Then the action goes …show more content…

Working for Hilly, Minny experienced lots of humiliation. Once, when the tornado hit Jackson, her toilet outside was ruined. Hilly’s mother told her to go to the inside one, but Hilly was against it. As soon as she heard Minny flushing the toilet, she fired her. The next day, Minny called Aibileen and told her that she went to Hilly’s house and “got her back” because she was telling everybody that Minny steals. At this point, we don’t know what Minny did, we find that out later. While she was on the phone with Aibileen, her husband Leroy came home and started hitting her. I can guess that he was drunk. I am sure that he didn’t find out that she lost her job because he would kill her. Eventually, she found a job working for Celia. Celia is a white girl that married Hilly’s ex-boyfriend. She is nice to Minny and she wants to learn how to cook from her, but there was the catch-her husband must not know about Minny. He found out soon, but he didn’t mind it and kept it as a secret. At the end of the movie, he welcomes Minny in his home and at his table. Minny helps Celia to get over third miscarriage and gives her consolation. When Hilly finds out that Celia hired Minny, she decides to completely kick her out of her “club”. Later, we find out about that thing Minny did when she said “I got her back”. Minny baked a pie for Hilly to apologize for …show more content…

The second character that I found strong was Celia. She does not fit into this society and she desperately tries to. When she finally saw the truth, she became happier. I liked the movie because the main focus was on black maids, but we are aware of The Movement. We are aware of everything else that happens, the killing, the riots and the fear. We see that black kids don’t have any education; Minny’s asks her kids why do they hold novel if they don’t know how to read. Not just life of blacks, we see how white women are expected to have kids soon as they get married, they need to know how to cook even though the maids cook for them. Also, husbands are always at work. The movie did not have a classic happy ending, there was lots of pain too. That is not a surprise because nothing can be solved with one novel, it just marks one victory in the endless

Show More
Related
770 Words | 4 Pages

Lastly, Tiny Soderball was a hired immigrant just alike Lena. Tiny was always getting in trouble with the men so all of the other citizens looked at her differently. Tiny did not settle with that and she then decided to travel to Alaska and take part in the Gold Rush. Tiny opened up her own hotel and grew a fortune. Lena, Ántonia, and Tiny go against the traditional female role, they maintain their independence and they take risks causing them to end up very successful.

Read More
1492 Words | 6 Pages

Franny talk about their life 's and what they have both been up to. They spend it by critique each other on how they should act and what they should not do. Franny tries to play the role of a good girlfriend listening and paying attention to what her boyfriend Lane has to say, but there bickering at one other cause Franny to argue with Lane on how she hates people that are phoniness and just wants to fade into the background and be a nobody. Throughout the story Franny 's comments on how a person has to act a certain way because of the social standards that are set. She spends her time in the story abiding by the standers and commenting on them causing her to have an emotional breakdown.

Read More
1218 Words | 5 Pages

The news of Tempie’s death shook Ella greatly. Shortly following her mother’s death, Ella was taken in by Tempie’s sister Virginia. After moving, Ella had a hard time adjusting to her new surroundings and became unhappy eventually starting to skip school frequently thus causing her grades to drop. It was at this time that she got into trouble with the police and was sent to a reform school. However, things got even worse for Ella while she was in the reform school as she often suffered beatings from those in charge.

Read More
1180 Words | 5 Pages

Towards the beginning of this movie, many blacks were looking at the white men with hatred for raping and nearly killing a ten year old black girl. The men transformed the innocent little girl’s life forever. The men were instantly

Read More
1381 Words | 6 Pages

The civil rights movement was a way for black people to combat that attitude. John included it in his story to support his newfound respect and empathy for the black race, as the newly demanded respect for them was

Read More
1574 Words | 7 Pages

Nazish S. Quraishi Professor Ahmadi ENGL 101-13 10 January 2016 Courage Triumphs over Racism The film “The Help” (November 24, 2011) of genre historical fiction directed and scripted by Tate Taylor is a faithful adaptation of the bestseller novel The Help penned by Kathryn Stockett. It is a story about how three women team up to form an alliance and secretively work on a writing project that would be shunned otherwise. The film portrayed the time when segregation existed between the whites and the blacks to be specific in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. The film began with a flash-forward scene where Aibileen a black domestic maid is being interviewed, how it feels to work for a white family?

Read More
866 Words | 4 Pages

That’ Miss Hilly 's special pie” Tate uses a mid-shot during this scene showing the smirk on Minny’s face when she says this. The expression on her face shows the courage Minny has doing this, she gets some revenge on Hilly, a woman who has been bossing her around and treating her badly for years. “Eat my shit” says Minny right after Hilly eats two slices of pie with her crap in it. This shows the audience how courageous Minny was saying and doing this deed. The audience is given a clear view of who the brave one is that does brave actions in this film.

Read More
696 Words | 3 Pages

Minny is perceived as someone who stands up for herself, but she is also an abused woman. For example, when Hilly Holbrook fires Minny, Hilly ensures that no job offers are forthcoming from any of the other women in the Junior League. Fortunately, Celia Foote is euphoric when Minny agrees to work for her. Unaware of the unspoken rules of white domination and black deference, Celia shows Minny that not all white women are iniquitous. Celia's benevolence gives Minny the courage to leave her abusive husband.

Read More
1018 Words | 5 Pages

Minny is a strong woman. She’s known throughout Jackson as an excellent cook. She’s married to Leroy, an abusive husband, and has five kids. Minny has a big mouth though and it makes her easy prey for the white women she offends.

Read More
759 Words | 4 Pages

The profound novel, The Help, can be interpreted as having many themes and subliminal messages about life, but to truly understand the meaning of them, the conflicting points must be recognized. Due to the fact that the setting of the novel is during segregation, the friction between blacks and whites is what creates the novel. Although it is easily recognizable that one of the main conflicts is segregation, there is a major conflict between two prominent characters, Hilly and Skeeter, wealthy white women. Some of the issues within this novel lye in location and the social aspects of living in a small southern town in that time. There are several underlying conflicts in The Help, but the main one that sets up all the themes are the conflicts

Read More
1084 Words | 5 Pages

Even though everyone is different and have different ways of living, they still stick around and help even though they have to go through harsh treatment sometimes to be appreciated. These women in the story are basically raising the kids of the rich white families and they are still living in poverty, belittled, and called out of their names. Stockett exemplifies this throughout the story for the readers to understand how life was back then for the opposite

Read More
709 Words | 3 Pages

This film shows the true layers that black women can have in films that is past the stereotypical The sassy black friend The ghetto black women The angry black woman storyline can only be done so many times. Seeing black women as strong and highly intelligent individuals in films and how this needed to related to real life. How this can be connected to the short book We Should All be Feminists, is

Read More
3436 Words | 14 Pages

The movie clearly exposes the many ways that the human dignity of African- American maids was ignored. They had suffered daily embarrassment but were able to claim their own way dignity. The film described about empowerment of individuals as well as about social justice for a group. It is a moving story depicting dehumanization in a racist culture but also the ability to move beyond the unjust structures of society and to declare the value of every human being.

Read More
610 Words | 3 Pages

Black women are treated less than because of their ascribed traits, their gender and race, and are often dehumanized and belittled throughout the movie. They are treated like slaves and are seen as easily disposable. There are several moments throughout the film that show the racial, gender, and class inequalities. These moments also show exploitation and opportunity hoarding. The Help also explains historical context of the inequality that occurred during that time period.

Read More
2515 Words | 11 Pages

In addition to that, the black community isolated Sethe because she did something that the community considered wrong. Black feminism will be the approach utilized here to see the oppression of woman of color because it includes sexism, classism and racism. Since the female characters are very dominant in the novel, a black feminist approach should be very effective and it enables one to see how the female characters deal with the past and live with it in the present, what motherhood mean to the female characters, and how much the past influences the female characters who lives in the present. The end of the novel reveals the forgiveness and the acceptance not only of the black community toward Sethe’s choice (killing her daughter) but also of the white people (the Bodwins) who accepted Denver to work for them. This reconciliation shows that the courage and the will to get rid off from the past to live side by side peacefully and to move toward the future together.

Read More

More about The Help Movie

Related Topics

Open Document