Lee Daniels’ The Butler

Cast:

Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines

Oprah Winfrey as Gloria Gaines

David Oyelowo as Louis Gaines

Yaya DaCosta as Carol Hammie

Elijah Kelley as Charlie Gaines

Cuba Gooding, Jr. as Carter Wilson

Lenny Kravitz as James Holloway

Colman Domingo as Freddie Fallows

Terrence Howard as Howard

Adriane Lenox as Gina

Robin Williams as Dwight D. Eisenhower

James Marsden as John F. Kennedy

Minka Kelly as Jackie Kennedy

Liev Schreiber as Lyndon B. Johnson

John Cusack as Richard Nixon

Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan

Jane Fonda as First Lady Nancy Reagan

Jesse Williams as James Lawson

Nelsan Ellis as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Clarence Williams III as Maynard

Alex Pettyfer as Thomas Westfall

Vanessa Redgrave as Annabeth Westfall

David Banner as Earl Gaines

Mariah Carey as Hattie Pearl

Directed by Lee Daniels

Review:

Some time shortly after the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, a number of media outlets searching for human interest stories about the meaning behind the first black president stumbled upon the story of Eugene Allen, a White House butler who’d worked for seven different administrations, moving within the heart of power during the most turbulent moments of the Civil Rights era. It was a story too good for many of them to pass up–including the White House which did indeed invite Allen for a photo-op after reading one version of the story. It’s such a good story that it was inevitable that Hollywood would make an attempt at it as well.

Fortunately, they have turned it over to the talented hands of Lee Daniels (“Precious: Based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”) who combines a solid vision for his story with an excellent chosen cast to overcome most of the deficits of Danny Strong’s (“Game Change”) uneven script.

At the front of the cast, and generally head and shoulders above it, is Forest Whitaker as our Eugene Allen doppelganger, Cecil Gaines. Born in rural North Carolina where he has little chance at doing better than his parents, both of whom are destroyed by the bigotry still rampant in the South 70 years after the end of the Civil War. The one thing he does get is some training as a personal servant and when he does finally flee the fields for the city, he is able to build those skills into the arsenal of a professional domestic worker. An arsenal formidable enough that he eventually comes to the attention of the White House and is hired onto its staff during the Eisenhower (Robin Williams) administration just in time to watch him struggle with the desegregation of Southern schools first hand.

An action which, though important to Cecil, is less important than his actual job. His skill at his craft has instilled a sense of pride in his work which Whitaker brings to the fore of almost everything Cecil does. A sense of pride which annoys his wife (Oprah Winfrey)—who thinks, not entirely incorrectly, that he cares more for his job than her—and confounds his son (David Oyelowo), a budding civil rights activist who sees his father’s work as insulting and barely removed from the slavery their people lingered under for so long.

In fact the scenes between Oyelowo, who grows and radicalizes from an adherent of non-violence to a founding member of the Black Panthers, and Whitaker tend to be the strongest part of the film, uniting both its personal and political stories into a series of potently painful shouting matches as father and son refuse to try and understand one another.

Unfortunately, they come very seldom as Cecil and Louis spends most of their time apart from one another in a manner that’s meant for their lives to reflect on each other’s but which actually hampers drama more than helping it.

In fact, Cecil spends most of his time apart from everyone, working hard with his fellow butlers (Cuba Gooding, Jr., Lenny Kravitz), while everyone else does whatever it is they do when he’s not around. Because Cecil is our point of view character, and the film loves to have him observing and interacting with the various Presidents who pass through the White House, the characters of his personal life tend to become ghosts as the film wears on, disappearing frequently and with little substance to them.

Which is a problem because as fun as it is to see some of the excellent impersonations of past presidents–Marsden’s Kennedy and Cusack’s fairly restrained Nixon are stand-outs–the drama is what’s going on at home with Cecil’s wife and children.

Even with the structural problems in place, Daniels and his cast make the thing work, and almost fly at several points anyway. Yeah, “The Butler” has some problems, but as preachy and inconsistent as it can get, an Oscar-worthy performance from Whitaker kicks most of the worst problems under the carpet and makes you forget about them, at least for a little while.

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