Black Man, White House, and History
Nobody who has seen “Shadowboxer,” “Precious” or, heaven knows, “The Paperboy” would mistake Lee Daniels for a realist. Nonetheless, his new film — released, as a result of a ridiculous film industry food fight, with the ungainly official title “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” — is a brilliantly truthful movie on a subject that is usually shrouded in wishful thinking, mythmongering and outright denial.
Witnesses to History, Some Still Unfolding
By FELICIA R. LEE--The New York Times
“Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” opening on Friday, is a story that should be told, say its stars, Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey.
Movie Review: 'Lee Daniels' The Butler'
Anne Marie Fox/Weinstein Company
Forest Whitaker in "Lee Daniels' The Butler."
Taking inspiration from an article by Wil Haygood in The Washington Post about the life of Eugene Allen, who worked as a butler in the White House during eight presidential administrations, Mr. Daniels has told the story of the civil rights movement in the bold colors of costume pageantry and the muted tones of domestic drama. He also throws in a few bright splashes of crazy, over-the-top theatricality, in the form of outrageous period-appropriate outfits and startling celebrity cameos, as well as dabs of raucous comedy. You may hear it said, in praise of “The Butler,” that it shows this director in a more restrained, responsible frame of mind than his earlier films did. This may be true — most movies not directed by John Waters can be described as more restrained than “The Paperboy” — but it misses both the subtlety of Mr. Daniels’s previous movies and the wild exuberance of this one.
The history of racism in America, and of efforts to overcome it, is usually addressed by Hollywood with a solemn, anxious, churchly hush and flattened into a tableau of villains and saints. Mr. Daniels and the screenwriter, Danny Strong, understand that both the horror and the heroism are connected with everything else that makes America such a complicated, interesting, appalling and glorious place: our politics, our popular culture, our deepest desires and our simplest habits. Making the topic safe and boring is no good for anyone.
The history of repression, protest and reform did not just happen on the abstract plane of activism and politics, but also in the lives of ordinary families, who were always doing more than just suffering and struggling. The genius of “The Butler” lies in the sly and self-assured way it connects public affairs to private experience. Early on, Cecil Gaines, the character loosely based on Mr. Allen, is taught that he, like every other African-American who wants to survive in a white-dominated world, must have two faces. This practical advice is an echo of W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea, articulated in “The Souls of Black Folk,” of the “double consciousness” at the heart of the black experience in America. “We wear the mask that grins and lies” is how the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar bitterly summarized the duplicity imposed by post-Civil War white supremacy on its emancipated but disenfranchised victims.
As a child, Cecil, living on a Georgia cotton farm, is exposed to the most brutal manifestations of Jim Crow, in scenes whose blunt shock lingers over the film’s gentler, funnier moments. The sight of lynched bodies swinging in front of an American flag and the terrible fates of Cecil’s parents (David Banner and Mariah Carey) imprint themselves on him and on the audience. Forest Whitaker, who plays Cecil as an adult, wears his own face as an impassive, benign mask, gazing kindly and patiently at employers who cannot fathom the pain behind it.
These employers are all the American presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan. Mr. Allen began his White House service under Truman, but altering the chronology allows Mr. Daniels and Mr. Strong to match Cecil’s career with the rise of the civil rights movement. Just as Cecil takes up his new job, Dwight D. Eisenhower (yes, that really is Robin Williams) is debating whether to send federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to desegregate the public schools. Ike’s successors, played with sketch-comedy verve by other familiar performers, will find themselves in similar predicaments, as sit-ins, freedom rides and voter registration drives in the South are met with tear gas, attack dogs and firebombs.
But it is important to emphasize that “The Butler,” unlike almost every other movie about race in America, is not primarily about the moral awakening of white people. Nor does it neatly divide whites into snarling bigots and paragons of tolerance. There are certainly instances of raw prejudice and of sincere decency, but the presidents are complex and contradictory creatures. Lyndon B. Johnson (Liev Schreiber) spews racial slurs even as he prepares to sign the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Lincoln. Ronald Reagan (Alan Rickman) treats the black White House staff more fairly than any of his predecessors — his wife, Nancy (yes, that is Jane Fonda) invites Cecil to a state dinner — but fails to grasp the moral enormity of South African apartheid. They all appreciate Cecil’s service without ever quite seeing him fully as a person. “The room should feel empty when you’re in it,” he is told by supervisors, and he becomes adept at disappearing in plain sight.
Cecil, whose job involves a lot of performance, is a fiercely disciplined actor, and the same can be said of Mr. Whitaker, who demonstrates how gracefully his character walks the line between dignity and servility. But Cecil’s working life as an invisible man in the highest precincts of power is only one layer of this film. It is also interested in showing his other face. And so the camera follows him into the kitchens and back rooms of the White House and revels in his easy, irreverent camaraderie with Carter Wilson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and James Holloway (Lenny Kravitz), fellow butlers who become his close friends.
The three of them are part of Washington’s black lower-middle class, a milieu that Mr. Daniels depicts with a warm specificity that recalls the short fiction of Edward P. Jones. The cartoonish pomp of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a world away from the home where Cecil and his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), raise their two sons, Louis (David Oyelowo) and Charlie (Elijah Kelley). Inside the family’s modest, gracious house, the film relaxes and slows down, and Mr. Daniels reveals himself, once again, to be singularly adept at capturing the informal rhythms of leisure. (Ms. Winfrey, meanwhile, demonstrates that, in addition to being the most famous and powerful woman in the world, she is a fine character actor.)
The raucous, funny classroom scenes in “Precious” balanced that movie’s operatic flights of social dysfunction, and the evenings at the Gaineses’ place — often attended by friends played by Terrence Howard and Adriane Lenox, speaking of fine character actors — serve a similar function here. History is recorded in the workings of power and the challenge of social movements, but it is lived by people who spend their spare time telling jokes, making love, getting drunk and wearing clothes that future generations will regard with envy and embarrassment. To rush through such moments would be to rob the movie of meaning as well as pleasure, so Mr. Daniels slows down and lets the characters breathe.
At other times, he sends them spinning breathlessly through the turmoil of the times. The movie’s dramatic engine is the difficult relationship between Cecil and Louis, his older son, who comes to resent his father’s cautious accommodation to the status quo. Louis, who attends Fisk University, becomes a kind of Zelig of ’60s racial politics. Often in the company of his classmate and sometime girlfriend, Carol (Yaya Alafia), he sits at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter, on a bus full of Freedom Riders, in the Lorraine Motel on the day of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and in a Black Panther strategy session in Oakland. Louis’s presence in all those places (and a few more besides) is meant to be symbolic rather than literal — “The Butler” is in every way more of a fable than a biopic — but the anxiety and anger that his actions provoke in Cecil are entirely believable.
In part, their story is a chronicle of the generational misunderstanding that has occurred in upwardly mobile families of every background, especially in the baby boom era, when educated and restless young people turned against the parents who had sacrificed so much on their behalf. The Italian-American family in David Chase’s “Not Fade Away” is in similar crisis. But Cecil’s job and the rapid changes in the South and elsewhere add an acute and painful political dimension to their antagonism.
“The Butler” has the historical insight and the generosity of spirit to honor the father and the son equally, and to look with skepticism at each’s point of view. Louis can be courageous and principled, but when his radicalism turns foolish, the film does not hesitate to take his father’s side. Cecil, on the other hand, is blind to the intensity of his son’s convictions and the necessity of the work his son is doing, and his proud patriarchal stubbornness hurts everyone in the family.
But Cecil and Louis, in the end, are doing the same work: they are insisting that their country, at long last, recognize them as full citizens and human beings. Mr. Daniels measures how much of this work has been accomplished, at what cost and with what enemies and allies, and never lets us suppose that it is finished. He dedicates “The Butler” to “the heroes of the civil rights movement” and leaves no doubt that people like the title character — including the unsung maids, Pullman porters, janitors and kitchen workers who toiled far from the White House — belong in that category. We remember those who marched and who stood up for themselves in the face of injustice. It is good to remember that, to paraphrase Milton, they also stand who only wait and serve.
“Lee Daniels’ The Butler” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Strong language, including racial slurs, and some violent scenes.
Lee Daniels’ The Butler
Opens on Friday.
Directed by Lee Daniels; written by Danny Strong, inspired by the article “A Butler Well Served by This Election,” by Wil Haygood; director of photography, Andrew Dunn; edited by Joe Klotz; music by Rodrigo Leão; production design by Tim Galvin; costumes by Ruth E. Carter; produced by Pamela Oas Williams, Laura Ziskin, Mr. Daniels, Buddy Patrick and Cassian Elwes; released by the Weinstein Company. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
WITH: Forest Whitaker (Cecil Gaines), Oprah Winfrey (Gloria Gaines), Mariah Carey (Hattie Pearl), John Cusack (Richard M. Nixon), Jane Fonda (Nancy Reagan), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Carter Wilson), Terrence Howard (Howard), Lenny Kravitz (James Holloway), James Marsden (John F. Kennedy), David Oyelowo (Louis Gaines), Alex Pettyfer (Thomas Westfall), Vanessa Redgrave (Annabeth Westfall), Alan Rickman (Ronald Reagan), Liev Schreiber (Lyndon B. Johnson), Robin Williams (Dwight D. Eisenhower), Yaya Alafia (Carol Hammie), Aml Ameen (Cecil Gaines, age 15), Colman Domingo (Freddie Fallows), Nelsan Ellis (Martin Luther King Jr.) and Clarence Williams III (Maynard).
