The previous movie from prestigious master of excess Lee Daniels, namely the polarising 2012 Cannes splash “The Paperboy,” was a most bizarre and rather intoxicating concoction, a thick blend of blood, sweat and Floridian swamp gunk. Relatively speaking, his latest movie, the newly released supposed Oscar candidate “The Butler,” is a much more conventional affair, but in its own little way it too is rather strange, if ironically for reasons that are altogether more unconventional (“The Paperboy” being more conventionally weird, most notably thanks to an already infamous scene in which Nicole Kidman pisses on Zac Efron’s face).
“The Butler” is strange in the sense that it wishes to be two different movies with two different ambitions: on the one hand, it wishes to be a gentle, warm-hearted story about a White House butler, played by Forest Whitaker, who watches his country change around him as he serves seven US presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan — the sort of light, Academy-friendly film that’ll play well on a wet Sunday afternoon. On the other hand, it also wishes to be a hard-hitting history lesson exposing the grim and violent realities faced by backers of the civil rights movement, as seen through the eyes of the butler’s political activist son, played by David Oyelowo. The mix is a peculiar and uneven one but not without charm as Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong explore the entirety of the turbulent African American experience in the 20th century through the lives of and tension between a butler and his son.
The film, as it so proudly states in its opening, is inspired by a true story, that of former White House butler Eugene Allen, who served eight, rather than seven, American presidents over the course of 34 years. Here, his name has been changed to Cecil Gaines and his story has been tinkered with, fictionalised for dramatic purposes. For example, the film begins with a young Cecil working in a Macon cotton field in 1926 when the white landowner, played by Alex Pettyfer, rapes his mother and murders his father. It’s a powerful scene, but one that has been made up for the movie — Allen grew up on a cotton field in Virginia, not Georgia, and he did not watch his mother being raped nor his father being murdered.
In his teens, Cecil learns the fine art of serving white folks, waits tables at a swanky hotel in Washington D.C. and in 1957 lands a job at the White House as a butler. Here, for over three decades, Cecil serves cookies and slices of toast and stands silently in the corner while the President discusses pressing issues concerning the rights of African Americans. Sometimes he gets to speak with the President about these issues, and sometimes his words have an influence on the course of history. As happens when Cecil has a brief conversation with Eisenhower, played by a bald-capped Robin Williams, about his son attending an “all-coloured” school, after which Eisenhower feels compelled to enforce racial integration in a Little Rock high school.
This happens time and time again throughout the movie: walking into the Oval Office with a tea tray in hand, Cecil witnesses first-hand pretty much every significant political decision concerning civil rights. You can practically see Daniels and Strong sticking a flagpole in each of the relevant historical events and then planning out how to get Cecil to reach each point and how he will effect or be effected by them. These parts of the film are essentially “Forrest Gump” in the White House, only without that film’s jokey sense of humour about its various historical contrivances but instead with a treacly sincerity.
These scenes are also marred by a series of increasingly silly cameos by Hollywood stars who come in one by one latexed up as the various Presidents of the United States — Williams as Eisenhower, James Marsden as wonder boy JFK, Liev Schreiber barking orders from the toilet as Lyndon B. Johnson, John Cusack as the ever-perspiring Tricky Dick and Alan Rickman as a barely human Ronald Reagan (but curiously no Ford or Carter). Smothered in prosthetics and looking like they’ve turned up to a fancy dress party, their caricature performances threaten to undo what drama is present in these scenes (though Marsden’s JFK impersonation is spot-on).
I found myself more interested in the more intimate moments at the Gaines household, with Oprah Winfrey sublime as Cecil’s long-suffering wife Gloria, and the sub-plot focused on Cecil’s fiercely liberal teenage son Louis, who, against the wishes of his father, heads down south to fight for racial equality. From the latter, Daniels wrings a handful of very effective and emotionally powerful scenes: e.g. a peaceful sit-in at a segregated Nashville diner which turns sickeningly violent and another scene in which Louis and his friends are viciously attacked by Ku Klux Klan members while travelling on a bus to Alabama.
These are shocking scenes, made more so by the fact that the events they depict really did happen 50 years ago (only here with the fictional Louis dropped in; apparently he was by Martin Luther King’s side in his hotel room right before he was shot dead). Comparatively, the scenes at 1600 Penn, which make up the bulk of the movie, seem awfully tame and lacking in a certain dramatic heft. Carried along by Whitaker’s wise and restrained performance and not much else, they feel a little empty, much as Rodrigo Leao’s sweeping, triumphant score tries to convince us otherwise.
I did like “The Butler:” its message of fighting for your rights is inspiring, it’s elegantly directed by Daniels and the performances of Whitaker, Winfrey and Oyelowo are very fine indeed. But after the trashy, unhinged melodrama of “The Paperboy” and the harsh, emotional rawness of “Precious,” this does seem like awfully safe territory for Daniels, too schmaltzy for its subject matter and, if I may be so blunt, quite Oscar-baity. Indeed, it has travelled across the US and now the UK accompanied with Winfrey singing its praises, a tactic which may well catch the Academy’s attention. Hopefully it does for the film’s performances, but as for the film itself, I’ve heard that a certain Steve McQueen drama also about African American hardships is more deserving of attention.
Rating: 6/10
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