Based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett, THE HELP would almost seem to be yet another film about bigotry and racial equality where the main characters are usually portrayed in a very shallow or black and white manner. On the contrary, the film is most vivid in its telling of a young woman, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone), a wide-eyed young writer whose hopes of being a journalist for a big New York publishing company are foredoomed to failure because of her lack of experience. Undaunted she finds herself returning to her hometown of Jackson Mississippi (circa 1963) where she lands a job at a local newspaper. Employment writing a rather dull “domestic maintenance” column for a small local paper serves as a temporary milieu, but soon she realizes that there are more important issues that need to be addressed. Skeeter later becomes cognizant of the fact that her rich, bigoted friends are abusive, coarse and insulting to their hired household help (this was a sad time in our history prior to the civil rights movement when blacks were not allowed to use the same bathroom facilities as whites, go to the same churches, schools, etc. Even owning or reading, much less writing a book on social equality meant eventual imprisonment).