Bill O’Byrne’s Bargain Bin Blues: The Butler

The Butler | Value for money: $$$$

• Directed by Lee Daniels.
• Written by Danny Strong.
• Starring Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Cuba Gooding Jr.

PHIL vs BILL
In this cringing exploration of race and politics in America, Forest Whitaker plays a White House butler for seven administrations. He starts on Eisenhower’s staff and resigns from Reagan’s before campaigning for Obama. Inspired by a true story but highly fictionalised, it’s so hollow and righteous that it might well have been penned by one of Obama’s speechwriters. Adding to its overwhelming sense of self-importance is a parade of top stars as presidents but none demonstrates the film makers’ naivety more than their expecting us to swallow Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan. The extras are slight but for fans offer the bonus of nine deleted scenes. — Phil Wakefield.

America is a bit funny about race. Sort of in the way greyhounds are funny about rabbits.

The Butler is a story of being black in America in the 20th century, from the Deep South in the 1920s till Obama’s inauguration.

It is “inspired” by the story of Eugene Allen who worked as a butler at the White House for 34 years but it is a very fictionalised account which is used to hang the story of the racial mistrust and prejudice which is a murky river that flows through big chunks of America’s psyche.

The butler Cecil Gaines is played by is Forest Whitaker, who sees his father murdered after his mother is used as a sex toy by the white owner of a farm they’re sharecroppers for. He is taken inside and taught to be a house servant (the technical term in this household being “house nigger”) and much later ends up in Washington DC where he is the butler at a swank hotel where he impresses his way into the White House.

There he serves every president from Eisenhower (Robin Williams) to Richard Nixon (a very sweaty John Cusack), a constipated Lyndon Johnson (Liev Schreiber) and Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan. (Jane Fonda eats up her scenes as Nancy Reagan.)

But the White House pieces are the coat rack on which to hang many issues of the United States dealing with racism, civil rights and how a society deals with its demons without murder. Well, too much murder.

Where Cecil has been taught that the penalties for stepping out of line as a Negro are at best social embarrassment and at worst economic disaster or the aforementioned murder, his son Louis (David Oyelowo) fights back as a freedom rider and a passive resister at white’s only Woolworths’ counter.

The rift between them grows as the race fight gets bloodier and more dangerous. Cecil is use to negotiating from weakness Louis takes the knocks to push the boundaries, working with Martin Luther King Jnr and then Malcom X, finding himself, Forrest Gump-like, at almost every signature event in the civil rights movement.

Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker in The Butler. Technically it is known as Lee Daniels’ The Butler due to a claim by Warner Brothers that they had inherited from the defunct Lubin Company a now-lost 1916 silent short film with the same name.

In fact it is very Gump-ish both in its historical timeline and placing people at the edge of epic events. (If Cecil had offered Forrest Gump a Dr Pepper at the White House, it wouldn’t have seemed out of place).

Binding their family together is Gloria Gaines, the most excellent Oprah Winfrey, while the other standout is Cuba Gooding Jnr as the head butler of the tight-knit black crew at the White House.

It works when the focus is on the people, it falters when it feels the need to be polemical so Everyone Gets The Point. To be fair, this isn’t that often.

Director Lee Daniels (Precious, Empire) also needed to trim all the presidents that had to be shown. It got very rushed at the end and felt like some lucky editor had to squash 20 minutes of stuff into a 60 second wrap up.

That said, at 132 minutes there is an epic scope to The Butler and the extras include a good making of doco (apart from Lenny Kravitz looking like a tit wearing his aviator sunglasses in a dark room). There is also Mr Kravitz and Gladys Knight singing his soundtrack song You and I ain’t Nothin no More and a gag reel which mainly involves Oprah Winfrey laughing.

It is a bold movie and it will entertain and inform.

Robin Williams as Eisenhower, and Forest Whitaker as White House butler Cecil Gaines.

Historical brownie points footnote: Just a mention of Bayard Rustin who must be in the running for the most Minority Minority in Minority history.

A pacifist gay black Quaker he got Martin Luther King Jr to drop the firearms King’s group were using to protect themselves with in 1956 and got them to fully adopt non-violence as a way for bringing down racist institutions and attitudes. He was a pretty useful singer too. (OK, the dropping the guns thing might have not worked out for Dr King. Assassination of good people is another tragedy of the American experience).

For a very good podcast: http://stateofthereunion.com/bayard-rustin-who-is-this-man/