American democracy, its virtues notwithstanding, was deeply flawed for far too long. The stains that grotesquely blemished the United States for at least a century were slavery, segregation and Jim Crow racism, all maliciously directed at African Americans. While whites enjoyed the benefits of freedom and liberty in the land of the free, blacks bore the brunt of second-class and third-class treatment. It took decades to dismantle the baggage of institutional racism in the United States.
Lee Daniels` The Butler, currently playing in theatres, recreates the bitter struggle that African Americans waged to achieve civil rights and equality under the law. Lee Daniels, the director, tells this stirring story through the eyes of Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), a White House butler who dutifully served six presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan.
The film, two hours and 10 minutes in length, unfolds like an extended history lesson, and this is both a virtue and a problem.
As he should, Daniels takes the material seriously. He does not appeal to the lowest common denominator, which is refreshing. But in keeping to the high road, he adopts a didactic approach, which can be deadening in terms of generating drama.
As a result, the movie comes perilously close to resembling a documentary with reinactments. Daniels’ high-mindedness, while exemplary, engenders detachment rather than engagement, thereby emotionally separating viewers from key characters and unfolding events.
Nonetheless, The Butler is more absorbing than boring, and this is due in large part to Whitaker’s superb performance, which is at once controlled and visceral. He plays a houseboy, a “house nigger” on a southern plantation, who goes on to bigger and better things.
The film begins in Georgia in 1926 as black field hands tend to cotton crops in a classic American tableau. A white farmer, acting out of a sense of entitlement, rapes Gaines’ mother, prompting a relatively mild protest from her husband. His “uppity” behavior enrages the farmer, who fatally shoots him in front of his co- workers.
After a spell as a house boy, Cecil leaves Georgia for good. He lands a menial job in Washington, D.C., where he learns to navigate the white man’s world. He learns, first and foremost, as black activist W.E. B Du Bois suggested, that an African American must wear two faces to survive in Jim Crow America. In public, he must be submissive and accommodating. In private, he can vent rage and resentment.
Cecil is an apt pupil. He masters the system so well that he is hired to be a White House butler, a position reserved exclusively for blacks. In serving the president, he sees nothing and hears nothing, blending into the surroundings seamlessly.
At the end of a day, he returns to his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), and two sons, Louis and Charlie. But at his modest home, domestic bliss is elusive. Gloria, competently portrayed by Winfrey, is having an extramarital affair, and Louis, a flaming radical estranged from Cecil, has joined the Black Panthers.
Epochal events of the civil rights era in Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi are boldly evoked in the film. White-hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan brandish torches. Louis, a Freedom Rider, is arrested by local police and thrown into jail. Cecil’s boss, John F. Kennedy, alludes to Louis’ incarceration in an empathetic exchange with him.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, is portrayed as a closet bigot who sounds like a liberal in public. In a hilarious scene, be barks orders to aides as he sits on a toilet seat.
The movie makes a telling point about the role of black domestics in American society. When Louis denigrates his father’s job, implying he is little more than an Uncle Tom, Martin Luther King Jr. sharply disagrees with that hasty assessment. King claims that domestics advanced the cause of civil rights thanks to their admirable work ethic and dignified behavior, both of which impressed whites.
The Butler exposes hypocrisy on all levels. Cecil has the ear of presidents, yet he cannot get a pay raise from his racist boss. Out of guilt, Nancy Reagan (Jane Fonda, of all people) invites Cecil and his wife to a state dinner after her husband, Ronald, has vetoed a congressional bill to impose U.S. sanctions on apartheid South Africa.
As the country changes from the 1960s onward, Cecil sheds his reticence and becomes somewhat politically conscious and attuned. By the same token, the fast pace of change confuses him, and he feels lost in America.
With the accession of Barack Obama to the White House, the film comes full circle. By then, Cecil is retired, a frail old man who can look back at decades of social progress in a nation that once belittled and humiliated African Americans like him.
http://youtu.be/DUA7rr0bOcc