"Servant"

Young, ambitious, and contemptuous of the institution of marriage, Skeeter ( Emma Stone ), having trained as a journalist, returns home to conservative, middle-class Mississippi, where they may have heard about the abolition of slavery, but blacks are still not considered people. The local elite plays advanced bourgeois, doing charity work for the starving children of Africa, eating chocolate pies and playing bridge, while their houses are run by portly black women who, among other things, nurse and cuddle their children. Skeeter, despite the fact that patronizing neglect, racial discrimination, humiliation and domestic cruelty are the order of the day, decides to find out what is in the minds of the maids and write a novel about their lives.

The film is based on the debut book of the same name by Kathryn Stockett , which, as expected, sold 5 million copies and remained in various top sellers for a long time. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the author of the book, like director Tate Taylor , is from those places, and was born just six years after the events described, which adds to the tape the flavor of a carefully smoothed autobiography.

Generally speaking, this is a woman’s view of the 60s, where there are almost no men, and if they appear, it’s only to drink whiskey and say rude things, and then go back to work. Therefore, in the acting ensemble, on opposite sides of the barricades, there are only beautiful ladies, and black ones, all together and at the same time, and the white ones are dogs and each has their own perch. For the first half of the film, Stone’s heroine is mistaken for a black sheep, both here and there, pardon the pun. The housewives, led by the standard stupid bitch Hilly ( Bryce Dallas Howard ), criticize her for being too emancipated and unwilling to smile hypocritically, and the maids, Aibeline ( Viola Davis ) and the titanic Minnie (who has already received a Golden Globe and a BAFTA award for this role, Octavia Spencer ) , they treat her condescendingly, saying that the lady has nothing to do in the kitchen, but without any ulterior motives they tell her their stories for the book. And only the absolutely beautiful Jessica Chastain, in the role of a straightforward fool from the bottom, sweetly offers her a bottle of cola. All five women take turns commanding the frame, and depending on who is in focus right now, the film changes its genre, smoothly moving from drama to tragicomedy, and at times either falling into pathetic morality or delivering armor-piercing humoresques on the topic of anal fixation.

"The Help" is actually 100% Oscar-winning. A bland, politically correct melodrama on a seemingly sensitive topic. Local critics are delighted. A 100% box office hit. Только если в Америке, кто и испытывал чувства стыда, или что там прилично испытывать по этому случаю, то сейчас все уже оплачено разнообразными пособиями, льготами и реверсивным расизмом, и единственное, что ещё готовы обсуждать - это слово "ниггер" у Марка Твена. Therefore, the story of suffering African Americans turns out to be more like a close look in the mirror in order to look for cosmetic defects. From this point on, the film looks like the reverse side of the Mad Men series, in the sense that it is also about outfits, retro and a disregard for the historical process, and it doesn’t matter where you hide from it, in the office on Madison Avenue or in card club in Jackson, Mississippi. In both cases, the events by which we today recognize the era: the Cuban Missile Crisis, protest marches, the assassination of Kennedy and “I have a dream”, pass somehow casually, a ticker on the TV screen, and everyone is much more interested in arguing about a new dress, gossip about neighbors and pretend to be civically active, putting forward initiatives in the “Toilet Committee” mentioned, it seems, in every review. At least in pre-election Russia, where even at a rally of a hundred thousand people they still continue to go about their business, it is this idea that looks like the main and very relevant one, and about “the day will come and even the state of Mississippi, sweltering from the heat of injustice and oppression, will turn to an oasis of freedom and justice" we have already heard somewhere.

http://www.kino-teatr.ru/kino/art/pr/2383/