As someone who grew up in the deep south of Louisiana and Texas, the help really hit home for me. I know and have known people like Miss Celia Foote, Miss Skeeter and even, though I am sad to admit it, people like Miss Hilly Holbrook. Because I know these people so well, I also know the help. The help we had back when I was growing up was a more gentrified one than is shown in this production. We were refined southerners, not taking to that institutional racism that we heard so much about in the history books, but we had help all the same. Men and women who cleaned our houses, our school, and even our streets. We would smile cordially at them, and pass them a kind hello but never stop for long, never chatting, and of course never get to know …show more content…
Miss Hilly Holbrook is a spiteful, racist and nasty excuse for a woman but she is a product of where she is from. The Help does a poor job of showing that the creatures that come out of Jackson, Mississippi, are as much a product of Jackson as Jackson is a product of them. Since the movie pans over the racism and the events of the times that are structuring the way these women think, all you can understand about Millie is she is just a vile, cruel woman when a superiority complex and a harem of women who are too spineless to stand up to her. There is no sympathy roused for the obvious villain of the story. I do not think that is a very good villain. You should always be able to understand what motivates someone to take action, even if you do not condone it, and that is missing with Millie Holbrook. The fact that the movie glazes over the more overt racism of the time, though it does mention the White Citizens’ Council that Millie is a part of, is one of the most glaring reasons why it does a poor job of showing the real problems of institutional racism. Every time it would attempt to make this point, The Help would perform its objective in such an underhand and mediocre way that it was missed. Miss Skeeter for instance, was shown as the champion of the help’s interests and eventually the publication of their story. Skeeter is just as guilty of perpetuating the racism that Millie spews as Millie is …show more content…
When she talks to Aibileen about it later, her words are “I’m sorry you had to hear that” not that she was sorry it was said. Skeeter seems to care very little about the actual plight of the help, more interested in their story and furthering her own career. At the end of the movie, when she talks about not taking the job in New York, it is not because she feels a kinship with the help that she has spent time with it is because she feels honor bound to help them now that her meddling has made their lives so much harder. Even though Skeeter is thought to be the hero of the movement, the white savior to the black help, she is no better than Millie or any of the other girls. She is yet another product of a racist environment that we never get to truly experience and understand and thus lose a part of the story. The irony of the situation is that the member of the community that is truly an accepting and champion of the civil rights cause is portrayed as an imbecile and a flake. Celia Foote is the closest thing that The Help has to a genuinely progressive cast member and she is a joke. She is a parody of what the rest of the country thinks