Review by Pamela Zoslov
The opening of LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER tells us the
movie was “Inspired by True Events.” Not “Based on True
Events,” because director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong
have taken considerable liberties with the life of Eugene Allen, the
African-American butler who served at the White House through eight
presidential administrations. Allen, who died in 2010 at age 90,
started working at the White House in 1952 as a “pantry man,”
polishing silverware and washing dishes for $2,400 a year. He retired
in 1986, after serving as maitre d' for the President and Nancy
Reagan, who honored him with an invitation to a state dinner, where
he was, for the first time, served champagne rather than pouring it.
A 2008 profile of Allen in The Washington Post was the
source material for this sprawling film, which stars Forest Whitaker
as the butler, renamed Cecil Gaines.
One wonders what Gene Allen would have
thought of the movie inspired by his life. On one hand, he might have
appreciated Whitaker's subtle, dignified portrayal, which captures
the essence of a man described by a White House staff colleague as “a
professional in everything he did.” He might, however, have taken
issue with the portrayal of his beloved wife, Gladys, here called
Gloria and played by Oprah Winfrey. Daniels, a director not known for
restraint, and Strong have imagined Cecil's wife as a blowsy alcoholic who,
feeling neglected while her husband works long hours at the White
House, takes up with a dissolute, numbers-running neighbor (a languid
Terrence Howard).
Around the modest figure of Gaines,
Daniels has created an energetic panorama of American and black civil
rights history, with Gaines as its silent witness. Daniels, who
endured a brutal childhood as the son of a police officer who
disapproved of his sexuality, is a director given to extremes. He
seemed to revel in amping up the luridness in MONSTER'S BALL, PRECIOUS and THE PAPERBOY,
which he rendered unrecognizable to the novel's author, Pete Dexter.
It's possible that depicting a quiet, uncontroversial man like Gaines
wasn't that exciting to Daniels. He seems more interested in the
swirl of events than in Gaines, who remains, at the end
of the two-hours-plus epic, a cipher as the film takes the audience
on a ride, by turns exciting and stultifying, through eight decades
of American civil rights history. In other words, it's less about
“The Butler” than “What the Butler Saw” (apologies to Joe
Orton).
The essence of the
movie is contained in this quote from Wil Haygood's obituary of Gene
Allen: “Mr. Allen was mindful that with the flowering of the black
power movement, many young people questioned why he would keep
working as a butler, with its connotations of subservience. But the
job gave him great pride, and he endured the slights with dignified
posture.”
The
conflict between activism and subservience is dramatized by the
character of Louis, Gaines' older son. Played by David
Oyelowo, Louis is a thoughtful young man who grows up painfully aware
of racial injustice. Louis' life becomes a one-man tour of civil
rights advocacy. He participates in the lunch counter sit-ins,
becomes a Freedom Rider and a Black Panther before entering electoral
politics and organizing anti-apartheid protests.
His
father Cecil, when hired to work at the White House, was been
cautioned, amusingly, “We have no tolerance for politics at the
White House,” and he has learned the lesson well, keeping his
opinions to himself while incendiary issues are being discussed in
the Oval Office, even those – like Vietnam, where his younger son
is serving – that affect him personally. “Never listen or react
to conversation,” the maitre d' who hired him instructs. “You
hear nothing, you see nothing, you only serve.” Gaines' apolitical
stance irritates young Louis, who wants to go hear Emmett Till's
mother, Mamie, speak. “Ain't no good can come of that,” Cecil
tells his son. “That happened down South.”
The
theme of subservience resonates through the film. Louis, who has
joined the Panthers before becoming disenchanted with their violent
tactics, accuses his father of being an Uncle Tom (and worse, disses
Dad's favorite actor, Sidney Poitier, as a white man's idea of what a
black man should be). The issue is also relevant for filmmakers, who
have had to answer criticism that movies about black history too
often focus on domestic servants (THE HELP)
or heroic white rescuers (MISSISSIPPI BURNING,
THE LONG WALK HOME, THE HELP, LINCOLN).
As if to respond to these criticisms, Strong's script gives
Martin Luther King Jr. some eloquent words praising black domestics
as “the real subversives.”
The opening scenes
show young Cecil Gaines, the child of sharecropper parents in Macon,
Georgia, learning to pick cotton. The horrors of slavery are
compressed into an intense sequence in which Cecil's mother (Mariah
Carey) goes insane after being raped by an evil overseer. His father,
who dares to raise an objection, is shot dead before little Cecil's
eyes. (This “Uncle Tom's Cabin” sequence has the Daniels touch,
the heavy-handed opposite of “the Lubitsch touch.”) The aged
mistress of the house (Vanessa Redgrave), takes young Cecil under her
wing. “Stop crying. I'm gonna teach you how to be a house niggah.”
(Said no one, ever.)
After learning the
art of domestic service, young Cecil lights out on his own. Broke and
starving in North Carolina, he breaks a hotel kitchen window behind
which beckon some frosted cakes. His Jean Valjean-like act of
desperation earns Cecil a job at the hotel and sets the course for
his career of professional service. While working at an elite
Washington, D.C. Hotel, where he recalls thinking “I never dreamed
my life could be so good,” he is recruited by the White House
maitre d'.
The panoply of
history that plays out before our eyes is, at times, enthralling.
Rhythmic intercutting highlights meaningful parallels. Louis and his
fellow protesters sit at the Woolworth's lunch counter and declare,
“We would like to be served.” This is intercut with scenes of
Cecil ceremoniously setting a White House table — to serve. The
lunch counter sit-in grows violent as the whites berate, taunt, slap,
spit on, throw hot coffee at and beat the nonviolent protesters. The
sequence is also brilliantly intercut with scenes showing the
students' training for the protest, in which they were instructed to
taunt, shove and berate each other. (The sequence is made more
thrilling by the music – Shorty Long's “Function at the
Junction.”) The film also makes good use of actual footage from
civil rights protests, with police fire hoses, German Shepherds,
beatings, the burned-out Freedom Bus.
I love that THE BUTLER shows how dangerous nonviolent protest was for the brave
people who did it, and that Strong's script embraces many of the
arguments – from a black perspective – about the struggle for
black freedom. Daniels' intention is clear from the beginning, when
he presents the powerful symbol of a pair of lynched men
hanging from nooses. It's clear Daniels has no interest in presenting
a Spielbergian paean to the Great White Liberator or a dutiful black
servant. His film personifies, in the father-son conflict,
longstanding disputes within the black community. Cecil believes
change comes from the top, and that the presidents he serves are
working to make things better for everyone. Louis believes change can
only come through activism, and will endure beatings and sit
in jail cells to achieve it.
Eugene Allen's life
was about his work, the substance of which gets only perfunctory
attention in THE BUTLER. We see Cecil polishing silver and shoes and
setting an impeccable table, and occasionally a president asks his
opinion about something. Robin Williams, looking for all the world
like Truman, is actually Eisenhower. As Eisenhower orders troops sent to
desegregate the schools in Little Rock, he asks Cecil whether his
children go to “an all-colored school.” (The answer is yes, sir, they do.)
The presidential
portrayals are a mixed bag, though most of them thankfully avoid pure
caricature. John Cusack, an odd choice for Nixon, actually captures
R.N.'s vocal mannerisms and haunted paranoia, first as vice president
and later, as a disgraced, post-Watergate drunk. James Marsden is a
too-short and non-philandering John F. Kennedy, and LBJ (Liev Schreiber) is shown
addressing aides while sitting on the toilet, something he did in
real life. (The movie's added touch is to put Lyndon's pet beagles at
his feet.) Ford and Carter are skipped for some reason; Reagan (an unconvincing
Alan Rickman) is uncommonly gracious to Cecil but holds stubbornly to
his opposition to sanctions on apartheid South Africa. It is Nancy
Reagan (a perfectly coiffed Jane Fonda, in a clever bit of ironic casting) who invites
Cecil and Gloria to the state dinner that offers Cecil a different
perspective. “Nothing seemed right after that,” the elderly Cecil
recalls. His consciousness at last raised, Cecil demands long-overdue
salary parity for the black White House staffers — who historically
have earned less than their white counterparts — and after retiring,
joins his son's anti-apartheid rally.
The movie's pacing
is a bit phlegmatic, with intermittent periods of excitement and some
meandering bits, particularly the bitter mutterings of Gloria,
the bored, drunken wife who mocks Jackie Kennedy and has scant
sympathy when the president is killed. (Maybe a happy spouse like Eugene's wife, Gladys, would have been too dull.) The momentum is hampered by
the linearity of the narrative, a long march from 1926 to 2008, just
after the election of Barack Obama. At certain points, I was
silently ticking off how many presidents there were left to show.
Yet this movie about a servant is decidedly
not bland. It's rich with personality and rife with controversy and
challenge – Martin Luther King, for example, not just having a
dream but denouncing the Vietnam War as immoral, the Black Panthers
presented in all their ambiguity. These are arcane and even radical
views you don't often encounter in mainstream Hollywood cinema. 3 out of 4 stars.
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