When some books are adapted for the big screen, they tend to lose the essence captured in the book. This is not the case for The Help, which is based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett.The Help airs Sunday 29 July at 20:00 on M-Net East and 22:00 on M-Net West.
Set in a southern American town during the 1960s, the story follows the friendship between an unlikely pairing. Two domestic workers, Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer) and Aibeleen Clark (Viola Davis), and the young friend of their employer, Eugenia Phelan (Emma Stone), known to everyone as Skeeter.
Davis scored a best actress Oscar nomination for her role as Aibeleen Clark, and Spencer won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role as Minny Jackson.
Skeeter dreams of being a writer in New York and when she returns to her hometown, she falls back into her friends' world: society women who host tea parties and fundraisers while their domestic workers clean their homes and raise their kids. Of course all these functions have their own gossip sessions – about the help, their friends and some women they prefer to not associate with.
Skeeter starts seeing her friends, and the relationships they have with the help in a different light. In most cases the help are the very same women who raised them.
Skeeter decides to write a book about this.
She approaches Aibeleen and asks her to be the source, and to provide all the details for what it's like for women in her position.
Reluctantly, Aibeleen realises it is a story that must be told, and she and her friend Minny become the primary sources for a book that will have the entire country talking.
As the audience you feel and share in the characters joy, and their pain. Director Tate Taylor takes you back to a time when race relations were at a peak in the US and he makes the characters believable, loveable and also irritable.
As much as The Help is about friendship and Skeeter wanting to become a published writer, it is also about relationships, compassion, understanding, love and change.
Catch The Help on Sunday, 29 July at 20:00 on M-Net East and 22:00 on M-Net West.
