The Help (Spoilers)

Great Saturday: Brunch and catching up and a movie with a college friend. For brunch we went to a mainline diner, Minella's, where I ordered the usual for me these days, chipped beef on toast (remember when you thought I'd never stop ordering eggs benedict?). I realized lately that they don't offer sausage and biscuits as often in the north. This is one little thing that the south does have on us (and one way in which DC is certainly the south). Well, that and more sun.

So, since there are no sausage and biscuits here, I eat chipped beef on toast. It isn't quite as good--I mean, who thinks toast is better than a biscuit? Okay, so toast is certainly better than many of the biscuits I've ever made, because I have trouble making them rise. Chipped beef is, according to Wikipedia, "thinly sliced or pressed salted and dried beef." It is often served in a white sauce, like sausage gravy, except without all that grease. So it's less delicious, but quite likely better for you. Anyway, Minella's is a plain old diner, except that it has a Cheesecake Factory-esque menu. Choices tend to make me a little dizzy, but otherwise, it was nice.


Then my friend, who was an English major in college with me, and I went to see The Help, which we both enjoyed. I was called to service since her husband wouldn't go with her. She, in better English major fashion than me, had already read the book, which she said was far better than the movie. She said it was much funnier. The movie had funny parts, but they were too quick to give people time to laugh. I mean, that, and the fact that we were almost certainly the two youngest people in the audience and the two who were laughing most loudly. There were a lot of older people there, which makes sense, given that we went to a matinee.

Mostly, though, the movie was serious--it was set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960's. An aspiring writer--a curly haired Anne of Green Gables--is frustrated by the treatment of the black maids who worked for the wealthy white people in the town. She convinces several of the maids in the town to tell her their story, at great risk to themselves.

I thought that the film was a little naive--it resolved fairly happily, which seemed to me to be improbable in that social and political climate. One of the maids was fired for her role in the book at the end, but she happily walks off thinking of how she's going to be a writer. And our Anne of Green Gables writer leaves her mother, who has cancer, and the racial mess of Jackson to go off to New York to write professionally. This is not to say that the film was happy throughout--it shows the incredible mistreatment of maids by their purportedly Christian employers.

The Help has several similarities to Mad Men--from the time period and the pretty dresses to the poor treatment of black people and women to the really atrocious mothering (theory: since women had few options other than to become mothers, they did it simply because it was expected and not because they wanted to, and so they sometimes resented it and did a terrible job at it). These are all things that are difficult to watch.


(picture, picture, picture)