dvd of the week
I must admit that I walked into The Help expecting to be offended. Because I knew it to be about a young white woman writing a book about the black maids in early 1960s Jackson, Miss., perhaps unfairly I expected it to be a prequel of sorts to the insidiously racist Sandra Bullock vehicle, The Blind Side. However, I was thrilled that The Help, in fact, is nothing like that. Despite (or maybe because of) some cloying sentimentality and an overly simplistic binary of good and evil, The Help is strikingly good populist entertainment about morality, ethics and bravery. Yes, it is about a white woman who helps black women rise up; but it is also about why and how these women fight back, why they decide to risk everything and why telling the truth becomes more important than anything else.
