The Butler
Lee Daniels (2013)
As the title character Cecil Gaines, a member of staff at the White House from Eisenhower through to Reagan, Forest Whitaker never looks the right age. This isn’t just a matter of make-up and hair: Whitaker always seems to be trying to inhabit the body and create the gestures and movement of someone younger or older than he really is. (Whitaker is fifty-two – around the same age that Cecil actually is during the Johnson and Nixon presidencies.) And, strange as it seems, Whitaker’s voiceover suggests a white man pretending, not very well, to be a geriatric black man. The Butler is inspired by the story of Eugene Allen (1919-2010), who worked for thirty-four years at the White House until he retired in 1986. According to Wikipedia:
‘Allen came to public attention following a 2008 article about him and his wife entitled “A Butler Well Served by This Election”, which was published in The Washington Post shortly after the 2008 presidential election. [The article] placed Allen’s life in the context of changing race relations and the personalities of the presidents he’d served. It ended with the story of how the couple intended to vote for Obama together but Helene [Allen] died just before the election.’
This does sound like a life story of real historical interest and with real dramatic potential but Cecil Gaines in The Butler is not a sufficient character. Lee Daniels and his scenarist Danny Strong have to build things up with an account of the career of Cecil’s elder son Louis (David Oyelowo) in the civil rights movement, then as a Black Panther. This causes a decades-long rift between father and son, a rift reinforced by Louis’s refusal to attend the funeral of his younger brother Charlie, who is killed in Vietnam. (Eugene Allen had only one son, who survives him, and who was not a radical political activist.) Cecil is staunchly apolitical – he sees being so as part of his job. This is intensely frustrating to Louis but it makes Cecil, to the viewer of Daniels’s film, no more than resolutely undramatic. It’s not even as if – unlike the protagonist of The Remains of the Day – he’s emotionally occluded by his commitment to dignified servitude. In the mid-1980s, Cecil belatedly sees the light, leaves the White House, joins Louis in a protest against apartheid in South Africa, and, for his pains, briefly shares a prison cell with his son. This Damascene change of heart doesn’t, however, provide Forest Whitaker with the opportunity to dramatise Cecil’s doubts about the value of his working life, and its effect on his private one. Lee Daniels simply cuts to 2008 and the election of an African-American president, which makes everything all right.
The most amazing thing about The Butler (as it is about Prisoners) is that it hasn’t been mauled in the press. (A O Scott in the New York Times calls it ‘a brilliantly truthful movie’. It currently has a 74% ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) The film’s prologue takes place in the Georgia cotton fields in the 1920s. A psycho plantation owner (Alex Pettyfer) rapes the boy Cecil’s mother (Mariah Carey) then shoots dead his sharecropper father (David Banner). An old woman (Vanessa Redgrave, as magnetically bizarre as ever) decides Cecil will be a ‘house nigger’ and his career as a butler is born. Lee Daniels’ direction spells things out from the off: these sequences are crude and mechanical. Although it’s immediately evident too that Cecil’s voiceover narrative will be lamely obvious, I expected things to improve once he reached the White House. But the screenplay by Danny Strong is programmatic. (As an actor, Strong shone in Mad Men, playing an aspiring creative with plenty of self-belief, who headed to Hollywood: that casting seems an unfortunate irony in the light of the script he’s written for The Butler.) In a legend on screen at the end of the movie, Lee Daniels dedicates it to those who fought for civil rights but the Ku Klux Klan’s attack on a freedom ride bus on which Louis Gaines is travelling, like the murder of Cecil’s father, is a scene from a checklist – and verges on the offensive as a result. The only racist episode with any momentum occurs when Louis and other students at Fisk University, Tennessee refuse to move from seats reserved for whites in a local cafe and are eventually assaulted, ejected and arrested; but Daniels dilutes the impact of what should be an enraging sequence by his obvious cross-cutting between the cafe and images of servile decorum in the White House, as Cecil lays a table.
For a while, Cecil’s home life holds your interest. The descriptions of familial and social routine and relationships are a relief from Danny Strong’s political history primer and the actors are loose and expressive – Daniels gets some emotional currents, and undercurrents, going, particularly in the scenes featuring Cecil’s wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), her friend and neighbour Gina (Adriane Lenox) and Gina’s no good husband Howard (Terrence Howard). Thanks largely to Cuba Gooding Jr, relaxed and vivid as the head butler, some of the exchanges in the servants’ quarters at the White House have a rhythm too. It’s not surprising that Oprah Winfrey is being tipped for an Oscar: she’s head and shoulders above anyone else in The Butler’s large, starry cast. Gloria – at the start an alert and amusingly authoritative wife and mother – turns to drink as she finds that Cecil is married to his job and Louis disappears into a dangerous world of activism. Although this is a clichéd idea, Winfrey, a quietly, continuously strong presence, impressively avoids melodrama throughout. But, as the tensions between him and Louis crystallise, interest in Cecil the family man begins to wane. By the end of the movie, the family relationships have become as lifelessly routine as the trudge through the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War newsreel and Watergate.
At the opening of one of the film’s most egregious scenes, Gloria, waiting for Cecil to come home for his birthday celebration, is grooving to disco music from the television show she has on. It’s 1973 and she has an Afro hairdo. After Cecil’s gone upstairs to change (into the disco outfit that his wife has improbably bought for his birthday), Gloria takes a phone call from the estranged Louis. The mood instantly changes and Gloria, her moment of fun over, removes what turns out to be an Afro wig. You feel that some of the other actors would have done better to follow suit – putting on and whipping off hats and false moustaches and so on. This film sets new (low) standards in silly wigs and facial hair to denote changing times and political affiliations – such as the accoutrements for Louis and his Angela Davis-coiffed girlfriend (Yaya DaCosta) when they come on a visit to Cecil and Gloria. Considering the impossibility of the part, David Oyelowo does pretty well as Louis (and Elijah Kelley is likeable as Cecil and Gloria’s younger son) but the film-makers seem to have forgotten that, by the time Obama is elected, Louis Gaines must be in his mid-sixties. Oprah Winfrey grows older relatively convincingly but the aging of the characters in The Butler seems entirely arbitrary. While the life story of Eugene Allen attracted attention because of his longevity on the White House staff, Cecil Gaines isn’t at all remarkable in that respect. Clarence Wilson (Gooding) and another waiter (Lenny Kravitz) are both on the staff when Cecil first arrives; both are still there when he and Gloria are invited by Nancy Reagan to attend, as dinner guests, a White House banquet thirty years later. During this time, Cuba Gooding Jr ages by about five years and Forest Whitaker by about a hundred. Staff turnover in the White House is minimal: the nasty white man (Joe Chrest) who first hires Cecil, and with whom he tries to negotiate every decade or so about the unfairly low wages of the black house staff, is also there to the bitter end and Joe Chrest shares Cuba Gooding’s secret of eternal youth. When Cecil tells President Reagan that he’s quitting (as if), Reagan is astonished, even though Cecil is pushing seventy. I didn’t understand whether this was meant to be a joke because Reagan is several years older or an indication that the President is gaga, or both.
I thought The Butler couldn’t fail to be entertaining as a relay of enjoyable cameos of presidents but I was wrong, thanks to a combination of baffling casting and caricatural playing. There’s an early laugh when Robin Williams appears as Eisenhower. James Marsden as JFK is younger and more conventionally good-looking than the original (I’ve never quite got why Kennedy, for all his charisma, was seen as super-handsome) but he’s OK – it probably helps Marsden that Kennedy is treated as sacrosanct. (Unfortunately, the scene in which Cecil informs Clarence that the President has been killed – after news of the assassination has already been on television – is a joke. The bloodstains on Jackie’s skirt when she returns to the White House are tastelessly overdone.) Liev Schreiber’s LBJ is nonsensical: in the White House he’s presented simply as a buffoon while in a TV appearance Schreiber is vocally and visually much more understated than the real thing (and his speech rhythms are more like those of Martin Luther King). Because he also appears in 1960 as Vice-President (and presidential candidate), John Cusack as Nixon has a relative advantage: at least he can play his Watergate drunken misery bit in relation to this earlier scene. The eyebrows the make-up people have given Cusack make him too eyecatchingly villainous (and, like Schreiber, he has an unnecessary nose extension) but at least he gets across some hints of clammy unease. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter have a bigger advantage in that they’re deemed not characterful enough to be impersonated at all – they just appear briefly on newsfilm inserts (as does Obama). There may be actors less suited than Alan Rickman to play Ronald Reagan although none immediately comes to mind. Rickman’s honeyed snake voice is as wrong as can be (who knows what accent he thinks he’s doing). Jane Fonda has an amusing verve in her brief appearance as Nancy; apart from Jackie Kennedy (Minka Kelly) and, momentarily, Lady Bird Johnson (Wanda Leigh, who’s uncredited), none of the other First Ladies features. (According to Wikipedia, Melissa Leo’s Mamie Eisenhower disappeared in the cutting room.) This is typical of the film-makers’ approach. They’re more interested in a roll-call of the people the audience is more likely to recognise than in creating Cecil’s particular relationships at the White House.
That birthday-disco scene ends with a knock on the door: Cecil, now dressed for a night on the dance floor, opens it to two soldiers – in the time-honoured words of a screen parent faced with news of their son’s death in Vietnam, he tells the military, ‘You’ve come to the wrong house’. This kind of crass contrivance (a birthday Cecil won’t forget in a hurry!) makes even things that really happened in Eugene Allen’s life – like the death of his wife on the eve of Obama’s election – seem, on the screen, as fake as the news from Vietnam. The benign reception of this terrible movie can only be explained by its professing a serious, virtuous subject. A dinner-table row between Louis the Black Panther and his parents is sparked by Sidney Poitier (Cecil and Gloria are enthusing about In the Heat of the Night, which they’ve recently seen) and his racial significance. The Butler makes you wonder if much has changed in film reviewing since the days when Poitier movies were often praised because they were about racial subjects rather than because they were good movies. To be fair to the critics of half a century ago, there was much more moral reason then to commend such films (and, as it happens, In the Heat of the Night is a good movie). The full official name of The Butler is now Lee Daniels’ The Butler. It seems this is due to copyright issues, relating to a movie made in 1916 (was this why no screen certificate appeared at the Odeon?) But Daniels – the man behind Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire – does seem to have a habit of getting himself into protracted titles.
18 November 2013