thoughts on The Help (spoilers on both the book and movie)

The main realization that both Skeeter and Aibileen come to at the end of the book The Help is that things aren't the same everywhere, and they don't have to stay the same in Jackson, either. It is fairly shocking and profound for Skeeter to realize that she can just leave Jackson-- that there are places in the world where Hilly Holbrook doesn't run the show, and she can have a completely different kind of life. It's the same type of thing when Aibileen gets fired; she has been a maid for her entire adult life and has assumed she would be forever, but now that's all over, and she's going to have to do something else, and that might be okay. I sort of wish, both in the book and the movie, that we would have gotten a similar revelation from Hilly, or at least more of a sense that she realized that things were changing, and it was beyond her control. I feel like, even though she somewhat got her comeuppance (moreso in the movie than in the book), and was perhaps knocked down a peg or two, she still was under the impression that she was mostly in control of things.

I'm also not sure how to feel about the fact that more people don't stand up to Hilly. Skeeter does; Minny does; both Hilly's mother and Skeeter's mother do (again, moreso in the movie than in the book). I guess this is not so much a problem with the story as me just trying to determine whether or not this is actually the way the world works. I guess my thing is that I am far from the most confrontational person in the world, but I will certainly say something if someone *right in front of me* is doing or saying something that is clearly very wrong. I think the book and the movie both would say that this is rare; in the movie, Skeeter's mother, Charlotte, tells Skeeter how brave she is, and that she hadn't had the strength to be that brave. If this actually is as rare as the movie suggests, then that bothers me quite a bit. I guess my frustration, here, is wanting many of the characters to be better, or to rise more to the occasions presented to them; I was disappointed in Stuart, for example, when he reacted so badly when Skeeter told him what she had written. I was disappointed in Elizabeth for firing Aibileen basically just because Hilly told her to. On the one hand, I feel like I wanted a happier ending than what maybe would have been realistic; on the other hand, I don't feel like it's that unrealistic to want people to do the right thing. Hmm.

I guess it's a good sign, though, that I'm responding more to the ideas presented in the book/movie than to the book/movie itself. Because honestly, I enjoyed both the book and movie quite a bit; I thought the performances from pretty much all of the actresses in the movie were incredibly impressive, and I thought they did a good job adapting the book into the movie. I didn't have a problem with much of what they cut or changed, though I do wish they would have done more to establish (in the movie) that Hilly, Elizabeth, and Skeeter were incredibly tight lifelong friends prior to the events in the story; in the book, Hilly and Elizabeth *genuinely are* happy for Skeeter when she gets the job at the newspaper, and Hilly *really is* trying to do something nice for Skeeter by setting her up with Stuart. I feel like since they didn't make it clear how close they all were, it also wasn't all that clear what was at stake for Skeeter; she's just losing some friends who were jerks in the first place, so good riddance.

So, bottom line: liked the book, liked the movie possibly even more than the book. Was disappointed with aspects of the story in both, but only because I wanted/expected more from the characters.