FILM REVIEW The Butler

ALL-STAR CAST?Oprah Winfrey (left) and Forest Whitaker star in ‘The Butler’.

What the butler saw


Cinema
Daniel Carey

THERE’S a scene in the 1993 Merchant Ivory film ‘The Remains of the Day’ in which Mr Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) continues his duties as a butler as his father lies dying. The relationship between father and son also features strongly in Lee Daniels’ new movie ‘The Butler’, which is loosely inspired by the life of Eugene Allen, who worked at the White House for 34 years.
When we first meet the central character, Cecil Gaines (played as an adult by Forest Whitaker, in superb form), he’s a boy in 1920s Georgia, who witnesses terrible things happen to his parents on a cotton farm. Raised in a world where the law was no help to African-Americans, he sets out to make his way in the world, breaks into a house while looking for food, and winds up with a job. Fast forward to 1957, and he’s employed in a posh hotel in Washington, DC where his talents see him hired to work at the residence of the US President.
The maître d’ who interviews Cecil is relieved to hear he’s not political, explaining: “We have no tolerance for politics at the White House” (one of the few badum-tish lines in Danny Strong’s script). Cecil understands that a room should feel ‘empty’ when he’s in it, allowing him to be a fly on the wall as momentous decisions affecting the lives of black Americans are taken by successive presidents. “You hear nothing, you see nothing; you only serve,” he is told.
Life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is interspersed with Cecil’s domestic life, with his lonely, troubled wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey, terrific) and two sons. The elder one, Louis (David Ovelowo) goes on freedom rides in the Deep South and later joins the Black Panthers; the younger one, Charlie, heads to fight in Vietnam, allowing director Daniels (who previously oversaw ‘Precious’) to tell a potted history of American race relations. One particularly memorable segment sees Louis Gaines attacked while participating in a sit-at a whites-only counter in Nashville, while his father waits on table in Washington DC.
Various famous faces make cameo appearances as occupants of the Oval Office. Robin Williams is reluctant integrationist Dwight D Eisenhower. James Marsden and Minka Kelly pop up as the glamorous John F and Jacqueline Kennedy. Liev Schreiber is Lyndon Johnson. John Cusack plays Richard Nixon, while Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda are Ronald and Nancy Reagan. We only see Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama on TV.
Father and son fall out over politics, despite an observation by Martin Luther King that black domestic staff are in many ways ‘subversive … without even knowing it’. There’s a heated discussion at the kitchen table about Sidney Poitier, a slap is thrown and orders to leave the house are given. When it’s good, ‘The Butler’ is very good.
Later in life, Gaines admits to feeling ‘lost’ and ‘confused’ by the world around him, but unlike Stevens in ‘The Remains of the Day’, he is never – to borrow a line from Salman Rushdie – ‘destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life’.
As a means of tracing the arc from segregation to Obama’s election as president, ‘what the butler saw’ is almost irresistible. Considering that some of the most significant parts of the story are fictionalised, it was sensible not to name the lead character after the man whose story (told in a 2008 Washington Post article) inspired it. It’s a project that clearly has Oscar ambitions, and many of the events it depicts have not lost their power to shock.

Rating 7 out of 10