Last month, my book club was searching for the next
book and when they came across The Help,
I mentioned how amazing the movie was and you know what? None of them had seen it.
That still blows me away.
We chose Kathryn Stockett’s novel and went with
it. I had a little trepidation getting
started. Not a lot because there’s no
way that a film with that much heart about a community of women could come from
a lousy book. But then, that’s what I
thought about Forrest Gump, and let
me tell you, that beautiful movie grew from a dung heap of a novel.
My fears were alleviated quickly because the novel
is beautiful. Stockett has a talent and
understands the novel’s special effect: getting into the characters’
heads. The chief difference between
movies and books is that movies have never done a great job at internal
dialogue and that is the books’ natural element. It is so much fun reading what’s going
through Minny’s head while she cleans up after her employers and her family. There aren’t many narrators who have ever
made me laugh more.
And despite how similar the plots are, there are
some key differences between film and book that I can’t help but point out:
It’s inevitable that movies have to cut things from
a novel in order to work. I heard once
that one-page of script equals one minute of screen-time, and while I doubt
that’s exact, the point is that given most books are at least 300 pages long,
if they tried to put in everything, you’d have at least a five-hour movie, and
nobody is willing to sit through that for every adapted feature. They barely tolerated nine-and-a-half hours
of Lord of the Rings and that didn’t
cover half the story. (I’m assuming that
you’ve only seen the originals. The
extended editions total up to 12 hours, and that still doesn’t cover half the
story.)
While the movie and the book managed to fit a lot of
Skeeter and Aibileen’s tales, Minny’s portion is significantly shrunk. That’s not a limit for Octavia Spencer, who
has a huge personality and makes use of all the time she’s been given to make
you love Minny, but the fact is, we don’t see her as much in her natural
element.
Her relationship with her abusive husband is lightly
touched on in the film. In the book, we
actually read exactly what’s happening when it’s happening. Minny’s pregnancy and how it changes the
power in the marriage is completely ignored.
And her time spent with Celia Foote has a much
different tone between film and book.
The film, Celia is just bubbly and adorable all through, and you can’t
help but love her even when she’s stupid and willfully oblivious. The book takes a much darker tone from the
start. Celia’s mansion and her listless
and idle moods have an eerie feel, like it comes right out of a Victorian
novel. And because the book, we’re
getting it from Minny’s very biased perspective, it’s actually easy to get as
irritated with Celia as she is.
And one scene that I wish had made it into movie is
when Celia beats up the naked guy with the fire poker. That was Celia’s empowering moment in the
book. In the movie, they had to switch
that to her cooking the dinner, which was sweet but it doesn’t have that raw
sense of victory the book provides.
One thing I did feel was handled to perfection in
the movie as compared to the book was the Terrible Awful. The book does a lot of lead-up but when the
revelation comes, it feels a little perfunctory. The movie, the revelation has punch, and
makes the rest of the events more meaningful.
It certainly added another level of audience participation and humor
during the Benefit Dinner than the book provides. That, and every actresses’ face is priceless
after Minny confesses.
In short, if you haven’t read the book or watched
the movie, do yourself a favor and get on it now. This is one of the those stories you should
have in your life before you go.
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