Interesting. I thought it really was about the voices of the maids. Totally. The book even more so. At least to me, it was.
Maybe not as deeply, maybe not as forcefully as it could have been, I agree with that. Your thoughts?
"NEW YORK (AP) — Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis has regrets about her role as a maid in the 2011 film “The Help.”
The 53-year-old told The New York Times “it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard.” Davis says if you make a movie about what it felt like to work for white people and bring up children in 1963, then she wants to hear how you really feel about it. Davis says she never heard that in the film.
Davis received a nomination for the Academy Award for best actress for her role as Aibileen Clark. She won a Screen Actors Guild award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a leading role."
There are reasons most actors have their publicists attached to their hips when they speak to the press. Viola’s a very talented actor, but she must have seen a different movie than I did.
Ben Affleck should rightfully regret having done Daredevil. Katherine Heigl, the 2010 winner of the “McLean Stevenson Memorial ‘I’m Gonna Quit This Show and Become a Big Star’ Award,” should regret every film she ever made. Viola Davis should regret her Oscar campaign for Fences where she would appear for the opening of a car door. But her film (or TV or stage) roles, nope, there should be no regrets.
The book distressed me so much I didn’t even attempt the movie. I’m from the south. The author, Katherine Stockett, writes my coming of age experience. However, I felt she also appropriated the voice of The Help. It is extremely interesting to me to hear Viola Davis’s take on all this. I don’t know about the movie, but the book still really bothers me. Just remembering it gets me all agitated.
Stockett could have told the whole story from the point of view of Skeeter, her white protagonist. I would have probably liked that book.
“I absolutely love the premise,” Davis said. “I love the fact that [Emma Stone’s character] said ‘I am going to write a story from the maids’ perspective of what it feels like to work with these white women.’ Operative term meaning the maids’ perspective. I don’t feel like it was from our perspective, that’s the problem I had with it. I had it from the very beginning.”
The book WASN’T written strictly from the maid’s perspective. It was third party reporting of maid’s experiences. It was a great book but “from the maid’s perspective” technically would have been a maid reporting her own experiences and how she felt on a personal level rather than gathered stories from a reporter. We watched both the reporter’s struggles as well as the maids. Part of the story was the struggle of the reporter to get any maids to even talk which precludes any real deep revelations of emotion by the maids.
Art tries to get it right, but it is not perfect. A white woman who was never in the position of those maids cannot tell the story perfectly. While a modern black woman could get closer to knowing how the maids felt, she still won’t be able to tell the story perfectly. The point is in the telling … trying to reveal the story. One of my students is from a wealthy family in a far-away country. Her family has a staff of maids. They have told her something of what it is to be in that position in that society. She does not pretend to know exactly how they feel, but she is using her art to explore their plight. It is intended to be a jumping off point to future discussion. Art provokes, and it opens dialogue in the hope of affecting positive changes.
She does realize that The Help was fiction? It was fiction about a book of non-fiction, but it was still fiction. That is an awful lot of angst about her portrayal of a fictional character that made her a household name.
@planit That’s why I am a wee bit uncomfortable with all the praise for ‘The Black Panther’ because some folks see it as a substitute for serious drama and dramatic and literary aspiration. I was an avid comics fan as a kid and the Black Panther was one of my favorite characters. But the cultural reaction to the movie stumps me because it’s a fantasy (and I love sci-fi and fantasy). I liked the movie but for cultural inspiration I would rather see films like 42, Fruitvale Station, Hidden Figures or even a TV show such as Black-ish, which is based on ordinary family life.
I like to see both the fantasy and the realistic stuff. We need both. I think The Help was problematic, but on the plus side I think it got people talking about the issue. Novelists are always trying to put themselves in other people’s shoes, I don’t think any race, religion etc. has to have a monopoly on writing about only their demographic. I think the issue with The Help is that many feel that she didn’t do a good enough job.
Lots of people think that The Help is all about how it feels to be a white woman fretting about The Help. Viola Davis is not at all alone in having second thoughts about it.
There’s a long history of novels about white girls/women learnin’ about life from the African-American women they encounter, mostly because they’re serving them.
It’s not pretty, but it’s well-acknowledged as to how questionable it is.
@skieurope I enjoy two Katherine Heigl movies, 27 Dresses and Life as We Know It. I loved The Help, great cast and Jessica Chastain character/performance
We all have our guilty pleasures. I, for one, actually liked Green Lantern, but even Ryan Reynolds admits it was a piece of crap, as indicated by the post-credits scene of *Deadpool 2/i
A reviewer for my local paper – an African American woman – wrote about her trepidation before seeing The Help. She hadn’t read the book, and while she didn’t think the movie was great, she felt relieved. “It could have been a lot worse.”
Which I think is what a lot of people in the AA community think about The Help. Ultimately it’s not ABOUT “the help,” but about the white community in which these black maids work. It’s well meaning – but mis-titled. It’s still a very “white” movie meant mostly for white audiences.
The Help, the novel, actually depicted voices and experiences of marginalized Southern women in their distinctions, and never making each on the same plane (ie., while being shunned by polite society is no fun, at no point does the novel compare it to the maids’ situation. Each character has her own story as an individual stuck in an oppressive system, that some were describing even at the time the book was released as ‘not so bad’. Reading the novel, you see it see it was bad all around. You see that very few benefited from a system that some current people want to be their identity. You also want to rise and take arms at the situations Abileen and Minnie find themselves in. To me at least that was more real than generic descriptions, just like seeing the police officer wrap wire around his baton made the March real.)
The Help, the film, did a poor job with all these voices. Skeeter’s the main voice.
So, I really liked the novel but didn’t like the film and I understand Davis’ criticism without applying it to the novel.
As to voice - that’s what fiction is about. By definition, novels are fiction, not memoirs. Their success resides in making us see through others’ eyes, think and feel like they do, even if their circumstances (due to time, gender, etc) are very different from our own, and engage readers in thinking about what they read. In that respect, the novel was excellent. Before that, how often was the female experience in the segregated South discussed (outside seminars)? All I can think of is The Color Purple, which is more problematic in my opinion.
Anyway… the film didn’t do justice to the book. Davis is right in criticizing her role as the film maker decided to handle it. Perhaps some day there’ll be a good film from that novel.
