Finally watched The Help, a couple of months after reading The Help.
What can I say? I know the old argument about how a film can never, within its constrained length, hope to describe what an author has unlimited pages to do. By the same token, the cinematic medium can bring the dullest images to brilliant realization on screen. So there, neither medium is better than the other in telling a story – it's simply a good film or bad film. Actually, let's make it even more fundamental, such that it cannot be reduced any further. It depends on the viewer, period.
As always, I have vastly digressed from the purpose of this post. This is what happens when words flow fast and easy from my mind to my fingers to the keyboard to the screen. Been a while since I have experienced such freedom, such fluidity… so I take complete advantage. Again I digress. Must be so annoying to you, my patient reader.
I liked The Help, the book. It has a rich assortment of characters, each one grappling with a unique set of circumstances. There is no savior, no messiah in the book. I saw The Help as a lovely collaboration of lives, each one supporting the other, through time and difficulties, only to experience a brief moment of sweetness, cohesion, love. Skeeter had her own set of issues, so did Minny, Aibileen. Skeeter didn't save anyone any more than Minny or Aibileen saved her. See what I mean? It was the coming together of different energies, intentions, faiths… Unfortunately, the film The Help is very different. Our heroine Skeeter is spunky, talks back to her mother, appears to be supremely self-confident and independent. She is pretty much the "white savior" in the film. Sad turn of the story, I think.
There is so much the book expresses by way of setting and atmosphere. The terrible heat in Jackson, the nerve-wracking three weeks as the deadline looms large, the intense fear experienced by everyone in question… Skeeter's own apprehensions and nervousness. The film skips almost all of the above, instead focussing on the little arguments and disharmonies, and the last moment of triumph.
If I recall right, there is a part in the book towards the end, when everyone in the church signs a copy of the book to present to Skeeter. I loved that portion. I think it got totally shortchanged in the film.
Anyway, enough about The Help. One movie that stayed true to the book? Brokeback Mountain is one of my favorite films. Finally read the short story by Annie Proulx and adored it. Each one (the book, the movie) is a masterpiece. Sparse, elegant, lovely and hopeless… Deserves another post. And soon.
