“I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard,” said Davis said. “I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom. And I know that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, ‘I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963,’ I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.”
When the movie was released in 2011, Davis received rave reviews and an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Aibileen. Jessica Chastain also earned a nomination while Octavia Spencer took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress — but Davis has a point.
Although the movie seems to be a touching story about the relationship between “the help” (women of color) and their white employers, the movie also received a lot of flak when it was released. The movie is told mostly through the gaze of the movie’s main heroine: Emma Stone’s Skeeter. Many thought it painted an unpopular “white savior” picture that pushed aside the emotional narrative of the black maids.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Deadline