All the presidents, man.
That’s one of the joys of Lee Daniels’ ballsy new film, THE BUTLER (M).
It’s the story of White House Silver Service Black Man Cecil Gaines who served the President of the United States from Eisenhower to Reagan, and a chief delight is seeing the cavalcade of cameos depicting the commanders in chief.
Robin Williams plays a bright Dwight, James Marsden a more than OK JFK, Liev Schreiber goes all the way with LBJ, John Cusack is a suitably sweaty Tricky Dicky and Alan Rickman charms as Ronald Reagan.
These characterisations are worth the admission alone, but Daniel’s stack the picture with a terrific leading man, Forest Whittaker and casts Oprah Winfrey as his leading lady. The movie marriage is magic.
And the casting pedigree doesn’t stop there. Cuba Gooding and Lenny Kravitz play White House colleagues, Jane Fonda does a finely tuned turn as Nancy Reagan, Vanessa Redgrave as a plantation matriarch, Mariah Carey as Cecil’s mum and Terence Howard plays a long standing family friend.
From slavery through segregation to holding the supreme office of the United States, this is much the story of Black struggle as it is the story of one man and it’s a triumph of dramatic distillate that Daniels and his screenwriter Danny Strong bring to this thoroughly engaging and entertaining panorama of politics and social change.
The big picture is distilled through the conduit of conflict between Cecil and his son, Louis played by David Oyellowo. Louis becomes politicised when his brother is killed in Vietnam, becomes a Malcolm X devotee and a member of the Black Panthers.
One of the great scenes in this movie is A Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner piece where Louis brings his radical girlfriend home and the table discussion erupts in a critique of Sidney Poitier.
Inspired by Wil Haygood’s 2008 Washington Post article “A Butler Well Served by This Election” about the real life of former White House butler Eugene Allen, LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER traces the dramatic civil rights struggles that ultimately made it possible for an African American to rise to the highest position in the White House with the election of Barack Obama in 2008.