Far too long? God, I had to ration myself towards the end of the book as I didn't want it to end. Likewise, the movie zipped by - didn't realise it was 2.5 hours until I got out afterwards and saw what the time was.
I am usually really let down by movie adaptions of books, but thought this was good and yet they managed to capture a lot of the book.
It still had a rather Hollywood feel-good sense to it (Minnie being served dinner by the Footes, for example, was way too hammy - if only that sort of thing did actually happen) but nowhere near as much as I was expecting it to.
When I finished reading the book, all I wanted to do was talk to people about it! I still find it difficult to get my head around the fact that this is (was?) my parent's generation - that it was illegal for black and white people to mix socially in America, of all places, only 10 years before I was born. And also to think that black people lived with this sort of domestic terror for 100 years before the civil rights movement changed things. And this 100 years was the post-slavery era when they were 'free' - that it was so worse before that is mind-boggling.
I loved the character of Aibileen in the book and thought that Viola Davis's portrayal was the best in the movie. She really did the character justice.
The casual cruelty that affected so many people's lives (thinking, as well, of the small (and grown) children left devastated when the people that raise them are dismissed without a backward glance) and yet they were forced to carry on living and serving these people and woe betide if they give even a hint that they minded.
And again - that this all took place so, so recently and in a country which defines itself on freedom, equality and brotherhood.