But that subtle lesson is lost on Louis at first. After King’s assassination, he becomes more radicalized, joins the Black Panthers and deliberately doesn’t attend the funeral when his younger brother Charlie (Elijah Kelley) is killed in Vietnam. The wedge that Louis’ activism drives between himself and his father, and the growing tension in the Gaines home as Cecil’s wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) turns to alcohol and an affair with a neighbor (Terrence Howard) in response to her husband’s distancing himself through overwork, form the dramatic kernel of this story that grounds the grand events of those years in the lives of ordinary people.
Oyelowo and Winfrey are both highly effective in central roles, but The Butler is mainly a star turn for Whitaker, who remains consistently and evocatively understated as he portrays an exemplar of the last generation of black Americans who dared not speak out against the relentless racism that permeated their day-to-day existence. Cecil has his reasons, having seen, as a young boy, his sharecropper father (David Banner) shot dead by his white boss (Alex Pettyfer), who had just raped Cecil’s mother (Mariah Carey). A sympathetic caretaker (Vanessa Redgrave) takes the orphaned Cecil in hand and trains him well in the art of invisibility as a household servant, setting him on a path that would eventually lead to the highest corridors of power in the nation’s capital.
It’s there, in the White House, that Cecil finds camaraderie with other black staff members (Cuba Gooding, Jr., Lenny Kravitz and Colman Domingo), who deliver the best ensemble work in the movie. He is deeply conflicted by the split between pride in his work and anger at the cavalier decisions being made by a succession of presidents that he overhears behind the scenes. But he takes his instructions to keep whatever he witnesses to himself very seriously – to the point of driving his wife to distraction because Cecil won’t even divulge how many pairs of shoes Jackie Kennedy has in her closet.
In his outdated way, Cecil is a man of honor. But so, in a new way, is Louis; and how father and son finally come to terms provides The Butler’s main story arc, even more than the unfolding of historical events through the succession of presidencies depicted. In the runup to the release of this movie, much was made of the casting of big names as those presidents, and the results of those cameo assignments are decidedly mixed. Neither Robin Williams’ Eisenhower, Liev Schreiber’s LBJ nor John Cusack’s Nixon is likely to ring very true for most who lived through those times (despite copious applications of putty to Schreiber’s earlobes and Cusack’s nose). James Marsden fares a bit better as a young and naïve JFK, lying on the floor to ease his chronic back pain as he chats earnestly with Cecil, picking his brain about how to do the right thing for black Americans.
The versatile Alan Rickman does his best to eke out whatever complexity can be found in Ronald Reagan, who is written as hostile to sanctions against apartheid in South Africa even as he assists an increasingly self-assured Cecil with obtaining long-overdue equal pay rates and promotional opportunities for black White House employees. And it’s hard not to grin at Jane Fonda, who’s clearly having fun playing her ideological opposite Nancy Reagan. But would Reagan really have indulged in verbal soul-searching about whether or not he might be on the wrong side of history in front of his black butler?
In the end, it’s the Reagan administration that provides the catalyst to Cecil’s long-delayed personal embrace of Civil Rights activism, when he and Gloria are trotted out as guests instead of servers at a White House dinner, and he realizes that it’s all just window-dressing.
The pacing of The Butler is overly ponderous; the setups often seem as contrived as any medieval morality tale; and at times it has the shallow feeling of a survey course in Civil Rights history. Nothing staged for the camera packs quite the punch of the real-life newsclips that its characters watch on TV of people being firehosed and attacked by police dogs. Still, thanks largely to the fine acting by the major players and the importance of the events that form the background for the family saga, the cumulative effect of this film is powerful and often moving. One can imagine it becoming a staple of history classes in middle schools and high schools throughout America. Let’s just hope that The Butler is only the first in an evolving genre that brings this critical period of history to life for all those who weren’t yet born when it all happened.
