Also published on new-format version of Cinescene.

LIEV SHREIBER (AS LBJ), FOREST WHITAIKER, AND WANDA LEIGH (AS LADY BIRD JOHNSON) IN THE BUTLER


Tripping through American history, lips buttoned tight

Telling the story of an exceptionally faithful and enduring White House employee who served through many administrations, Lee Daniels' The Butler attempts to run through not just every president from Eisenhower to Obama but virtually the whole history of race in America. It seems like he (the protagonist, played by a very deadpan Forest Whitaker) and Oprah (Winfrey, as his wife) would be 100 by the end (though he retires with Reagan). This is as much of a lesson in American history as Spielberg's Lincoln but less high-toned and more kitsch as well as more visceral and touching. The audience when I watched the movie was largely black and they were pretty enthusiastic. Fault it though you may, The Butler provides lots to cheer or cry about. It's received respectable reviews, with neither the raves Daniels inexplicably got for his lurid Precious nor the unjustified attacks for his enjoyably campy The Paperboy. It's a kick to watch Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan. Some other cameos are good, though many are slapdash at best. The presidents don't look or act particularly like who they're supposed to be.

There's something breathtakingly facile about the witnessing to history that takes place in The Butler. Cecil Gaines (Forrest Whittiker), who has fled from a deep south cotton plantation as a boy in 1927 after seeing his father shot dead for objecting when a woman is raped, gets a job at a nice Washington, DC hotel and learns to be a waiter. He's told that the epitome of skill is to seem nonexistent. "The room should feel empty when you're in it," he's instructed. This is how he lives his life. Carrying trays to the Oval Office, he remains buttoned down and tight-lipped, as he must, when the most crucial issues to black people are being discussed. The real action is approached by proxy, not through Cecil but his son Louis (David Oyelowo), who grows up to attend Fisk University in Tennessee and becomes a militant participating in sit-ins and marching and going to jail with Martin Luther King. Louis even becomes a Black Panther, later (having it all) managing to enter mainstream politics. It's only by flipping back and forth between Cecil's paradoxically posh but servile work and his son's risky activism that the story achieves its historical relevance.

We are asked to believe that Cecil Gaines' silence and patience are heroic. And they are. But the implication that his patience and persistence had anything to do with Obama's becoming president is factitious. Cecil's longevity at the White House is impressive but it's hard to see how it influenced the course of history. And as for his militant son Louis, Cecil objects to everything he does, and for many years they don't even speak. In Louis' Black Panther phase even Gloria expels him and his rude radical girlfriend Carol (Yaya Alafia), whom she calls "low-class," from the house. This makes way for a corny reunion between the retired Cecil and the now respectable, but still activist, Louis at the end.

The Butler is a sightseeing tour. As black American critic Armond White says in his sharp, perceptive review, most of its historical figures have an artificial, "waxworks" quality. This becomes a tour of celebrity actors. We wind up gawking at them, like tourists at the White House. If Daniels had chosen to work on a smaller canvas and observed his protagonist at work with more precision and in more detail, this movie might have revealed more about race, politics, and human nature than it does.

The home life of Cecil Gaines revolves around his chain-smoking, alcoholic wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and his two sons. The younger one, Charlie (Isaac White, Elijah Kelley), not as ambitious and smart as Louis, is funny and may be gay (like the filmmaker), but he too turns into a token, leaving college and going off to Vietnam to become a stand-in for all the black men who died there while Louis, and Muhammad Ali, won't go off and kill other people of color. Gloria too is a missed opportunity. She has a flirtation that might have turned into considerably more with a no-count neighbor (an enjoyably sleazy Terrence Howard) who's a frequent drinking companion while Cecil is working long hours at the White House. But Daniels isn't going to take any walks on the wild side here. Gloria banishes Howard, telling him to get his "yellow ass" out, and she quits drinking and lasts a long time, serving almost as faithfully at home as her husband does under all those presidents.

The presidents come and go. Do they really matter? Daniels makes use of liberal-left actors, Vanessa Redgrave as the southern cotton farm grandma whose son kills Cecil's father, Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan, John Cusack as Nixon. We get a glimpse of Jackie Kennedy (Minka Kelly) in the blood-stained pink suit, memorable because it is a spectral, dreamlike moment. Daniels gives us two presidential paradoxes. Lyndon Johnson (Liev Schreiber), shown, with the director's penchant for colorful crudity, giving public audiences while sitting on the toilet (with his dogs), passes the most significant civil rights legislation since Lincoln. But he also throws around the N-word, the black White House staffers have to aver, more freely than any of they do. The other paradox: the anti-black Ronald Reagan (Alan Rickman) is the one who finally forces the White House's bigoted manager to promote black employees and pay them equal salaries as Cecil has petitioned him to do through three administrations. And it's Reagan and Nancy who invite Cecil and Gloria to a state dinner -- as guests.

All this is based on an article by Will Haygood in the Washington Post that came out when Obama won the Presidency in 2008, "A Butler Well Served by this Election." In the article, the butler in question, Eugene Allen, who served from Truman through Reagan, is like Daniels' Cecil Gaines, a rack on which to hang many historical details. Haygood's focus is on the slow appearance of black officials in the various administrations, a subject Daniels overlooks. This White House butler didn't have a militant son or a Django-like cotton plantation childhood. He just suffered through a youth in Jim Crow Virginia. All the rest is invented for the movie. Daniels has tried to make Cecil and his militant son stand for all black experience in America from the Twenties through the Eighties, and it's too much.

While The Butler is superficial and simplistic, and it's very valid as Armond White says that Eisenstein would "wince" at the crude cross-cutting between a brutal lunch counter sit-in sequence and a White House state dinner where Cecil's serving, it's nonetheless worth pondering its contrast between the valor of the long suffering older black generations in America and the boldness of the more militant and privileged younger ones. For some of us, the blessed arrival of President Obama will the the deepest irony.

Lee Daniels' The Butler, 132 mins., was released in the US (by the Weinstein Company) 16 August 2013. The inclusion of the director's name in the title was due to a dispute with Warner Bros. about rights to it.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.