'The Help' Trailer Deals with Racial Tensions in Lighthearted Enough Way You Won't Have To Feel Too Bad
If your preferred way of exploring racial inequality in the 1960s American South is through TV movie-level inspirational melodrama, here's a treat for you. In The Help, you'll learn about the historical plight of the African-American hired help, a group of strong women who cooked, cleaned, and nannied yet weren't even allowed to use the same bathroom as the children they tended--while white help like Alice from The Brady Bunch were receiving the prominent center square on the family's opening sequence grid. If that sounds like a tough emotional pill to swallow, don't worry: the whole thing is mostly told through the perspective of cute young recent-graduate Emma Stone, who's writing a book that tells the help's story and will likely change the outlooks of a few of these local segregationists before the credits roll, so you'll probably still be able to walk out of the theater feeling pretty decent about being a white person, if you're a white person. Instead, you'll mostly just feel bad that you're now old enough that Whoopi Goldberg isn't even a mandatory presence in this kind of thing anymore.
(from Moviefone)
