In its first five days, the film adaptation of “The Help” has earned more than $35 million. According to Disney, which released the movie as part of a partnership with Dreamworks, “74 percent of the audience was female and 60 percent was over the age of 35,” Entertainment Weekly reported Sunday.
The social drama, set in Civil Rights-era Jackson, Miss., focuses on the lives of African American domestic workers and the white women who employ them. Some of the women are involved in a clandestine project that puts “them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed,” according to Stockett’s Web site.
While fans of the book and others fill theaters, many people also are taking issue with aspects of the movie.
“#TheHelpMovie reduces systematic, violent racism, sexism & labor exploitation to a cat fight that can be won w/ cunning spunk,” Tulane professor Melissa Harris-Perry live-tweeted Wednesday during a screening. Harris-Perry is author of “Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America,” a former professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University and current contributor to MSNBC and The Nation columnist.
“I understand the sentiment that movies/culture are frivolous compared to ‘real issues’ but these images matter,” she tweeted as she suggested different works dealing with race, gender and class such as Chana Kai Lee’s “For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer”; Micki McElya’s “Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in the 20th Century”; and Tera Hunter’s “To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War”.
To read other reaction to the film, visit the Washington Post’s OnFaith and BlogPost blogs.
