The Butler (***)

Directed by: Lee Daniels

Starring: Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Cuba Gooding Jr., Lenny Kravitz, Robin Williams, James Marsden, Minka Kelly, Liev Schreiber, John Cusack, Alan Rickman, Jane Fonda, Nelsan Ellis, David Oyelowo, Elijah Kelley, David Banner, Mariah Carey, Terrence Howard, Alex Pettyfer, Vanessa Redgrave, Clarence Williams III

Seen: November 29^th 2013

*** Out of ****

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is an epic telling of a life in service of the White House, where presidents come and go as the staff remains. It is loosely based on the life of Eugene Allen, and stars Forest Whitaker in the lead role as Cecil Gaines, a White House butler who served for 34 years, witnessing many prominent events of 20^th Century America. While the movie deftly creates many of the situations that were prevalent in families and among friends and colleagues at the relevant times, it does at times take artistic licence with the actual events the movie is based on. What we’re left with is a very decent period drama with some fact and some distorted fact used as backdrop for a very touching human drama.

As a child working on a cotton plantation, Cecil Gaines’ father (Banner) is shot by the plantation owner Thomas Westfall (Pettyfer) after he confronts him for raping his wife (Carey). Annabeth Westfall, Thomas’ mother, takes Cecil in and trains him as a house servant, something Cecil excels at. Cecil leaves the plantation some years later and in a weak moment of hunger and desperation breaks into a pastry shop where he is caught but then hired by Maynard (Williams III), who teaches him the rest of the finery needed to become a good butler, and who, years later, is the person to help him get a job at the White House. In the meantime, Cecil marries Gloria (Winfrey), and they have two sons, Louis (Oyelowo) & Charlie (Kelley). Cecil starts at the White House in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s term, where he meets colleagues and friends of many years to come, Head Butler Carter Wilson (Gooding Jr.) & co-worker James Holloway (Kravitz).

Louis Gaines goes to university in the South, with racial tensions still high, and as Gaines continues serving and is increasingly exposed to the different presidents’ viewpoints and actions regarding especially race, Louis becomes involved in protest movements and activism while his mother, Gloria, succumbs to alcoholism and has an affair with their neighbour, Howard (Howard). During Kennedy’s (Marsden) term Louis is faced with extreme prejudice in the south and with national tensions soaring Kennedy is assassinated, and Jackie Kennedy (Kelly) gives Cecil one of Kennedy’s ties as a keepsake. All the while Louis’ desperate protests with the Black Panthers turn more towards violence, and Cecil and Louis bump heads regularly. The Gaines’ go through increasingly tough times, and the movie follows both the personal life of Cecil and his professional life ruled by politics, where he interacts with a string of presidents: Lyndon B. Johnson (Schreiber), Richard Nixon (Cusack), and even Ronald Reagan (Rickman). Reagan is also where Cecil’s tenure at the White House ends, as Cecil believes his stance on sanctions against a then very strong apartheid regime in South Africa is not decisive enough (but the movie does not include Reagan’s full thoughts and reasons around the sanctions, for not jumping to impose them sooner – according to biographer Paul Kengor, “Reagan was appalled by apartheid, but also wanted to ensure that if the apartheid regime collapsed in South Africa that it wasn't replaced by a Marxist-totalitarian regime allied with Moscow and Cuba that would take the South African people down the same road as Ethiopia, Mozambique, and, yes, Cuba”). The movie simply portrays Reagan as weak and slow to act.

The Butler is a beautiful tale of servitude and family and struggling for understanding and a voice in all of it, and it made me feel both the pride in their jobs and the frustration at the situations of the times, The Butler is really a very good movie.