The Help 2011 Film Wiki



Set in Jackson, Mississippi during 1963, Skeeter Phelan, is a 23-year-old white woman who returns from college determined to become a writer, but turns her friends' lives and a Mississippi town upside down when she decides to interview the African American women who have spent their lives taking care of prominent southern white families. Jackson was a flashpoint for the Civil Rights Movement. It was a dangerous and violent place. The untold stories of black women's experience in service to white women are most definitely part of the narrative of civil rights in America. But The Help is ultimately less about those demeaned black servants than it is about their white sympathizers, in a way that comes dangerously close to missing the point entirely.

The Civil Rights Movement was complex and vast and included white heroes as well as black ones. A 53-year-old African American maid, Aibileen Clark, has raised “seventeen white children," and now works for Elizabeth Leefolt. Miss Leefolt has a 2 1/2-year-old chubby and wild daughter named Mae Mobley Leefolt, being raised primarily by Aibileen, because Elizabeth can barely stand to look at her.

Minny Jackson, a 33-year-old African American maid (also Aibileen's best friend) is unable to hold down a job as a maid because of her “sass mouth." She finally gets a job working for Celia Foote, a white incompetent sexpot housewife, who hires her mainly because she needs a friend and also someone who can teach her how to cook.

Skeeter is home from college, living on her parents’ huge cotton plantation and trying to find a job, despite the horror of her terminally ill mother, Charlotte Phelan, who wants her daughter to straighten her hair and find a man, stat. Even though Skeeter is seemingly an outsider with her old crowd, she still plays bridge with them, and edits the newsletter for the Women’s League. An editor in New York, Elaine Stein, tells her to write about things that bother her, and slowly, as Skeeter looks around her at the anonymous black maids in every house, she gets the idea to interview maids about their experience working for white women.

Naturally, the maids she approaches initially say hell no, lady. Aibileen and Minny are the first to agree, and others follow. The Medger Evers murder puts the heat under their secret project, but the outer world of the civil rights fight has very little place here in this domestic hothouse. In a way, this is an interesting angle on well-known events. Men dominated the political sphere, and women dominated at home. Men are nearly nonexistent in The Help, either ineffective nonentities or violent brutes.

While civil rights activists are fighting on a national scale, the white ladies of Jackson start a campaign to get every house equipped with a separate bathroom for "the help." Spearheaded by the white soulless, wealthy and racist Hilly Holbrook, the women begin gathering their forces to relegate the help to outhouses where they belong. The obsession with shit is one of the underlying themes of The Help, which also comes into play with the “Terrible Awful” trick that Minny pulls on Hilly as revenge for losing her job. Hilly, an immaculate and yet ridiculous person, with little pink bows pasted onto her giant beehives, is seething with repressed and angry bowel movements, basically, and so she spews her racist slurs onto everybody in her path. Skeeter and Hilly were once friends, which supposedly explains why Skeeter still hangs out with such a hideous human being, but it doesn’t explain it enough. Skeeter is shown repeatedly as an independent quirky young woman with a mind of her own. Surely she can see that her friends are vile.