The Help

It is the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi with the civil rights movement in it's infancy and African Americans provide domestic assistance and child rearing for an unthinking and privileged white community. The daughters of these privileged families, reared lovingly by caring African American servants, grow to be as thoughtless and ruthless in their treatment of The Help as their mothers.

One who bucks this trend is the University educated 'Skeeter' (Emma Stone) who decides to write about the treatment and experiences of the put upon domestics. Gradually as their treatment becomes intolerable, one domestic worker after another opens up to Skeeter providing her with the material for the book.

I gather there really was such a book and this movie relates how it came about. In some ways there seems to be a lot of stereotyping in the film which gives it an unsatisfactory feel but it remains a reasonable film, often quite humorous and yet shocking in it's depiction of the inhumanity of that society and times.