Chastain Now Part of ‘The Help’

We’ll soon be finding Jessica Chastain in a plethora of film roles in the autumn this year (THR reports that Miramax is somehow still afloat and releasing The Debt in October) and she is booking a role for next month in Greenwood, Mississippi on Tate Taylor’s The Help (he was recently seen in a bit part in Winter’s Bone).

The DreamWorks’ project will pit Chastain and fellow redhead Bryce Dallas Howard alongside Viola Davis, Emma Stone and Octavia Spencer in the South set tale centering on black maids working in white households in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. Chastain is playing Celia Foote, an insecure Southern lady constantly trying to fit in with the high society women who reject her. Based on Kathryn Stockett’s novel – which seems to have lit a fire in the book world, sounds like Oscar bait with a consciousness – as it has Participant Media involved with Imagenation Abu Dhabi are co-producing the movie with DreamWorks. Disney’s Touchstone Pictures will distribute. Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan are producing. I’d bet on an October 2011 release.

Though my first thought was the Lars von Trier’s U.S of A trilogy and the the under-appreciated work that Todd Haynes did on Far From Heaven, but the book’s synopsis clearly defines this as a women strong project uniting against what was the intolerant South. Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women–mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends–view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.