Film Review: The Butler

The Butler. Rated M (mature themes, violence and coarse language). 132 minutes. Directed by Lee Daniels. Written by Danny Strong.

Verdict: A finely wrought drama about realising why and when to make a stand.

With Precious (2009), his blistering tale of privilege, abuse, poverty and ambition, Daniels delivered a compelling drama about difference. With The Butler, (loosely based Will Haywood’s Washington Post article about 89-year-old Eugene Allen who worked as a butler to eight American Presidents in the White House for 30 years), the drama is considerably less compelling, but certainly as profound.

Strong’s screenplay takes too many liberties with the origins of the story, and bundles every fictionalised dramatic highpoint up into a neat little package. The result is that the epic sweep of the story becomes more like a montage of conflict-driven snapshots – a series of hastily scribbled postcards from inside the American capital rather than a deeper engagement with one man’s unique perspective on the advancement of civil rights.

Forest Whittaker (The Last King of Scotland) is excellent as (the re-named) Cecil Gaines, delivering a performance of exceptional power, grace and humility. As the family and political conflict swirls around him, Whittaker’s Gaines wages an invisible war with his own conscience. When his conscience finally defeats his sense of duty, it is as fine a scene as we have witnessed in the cinema this year.

If you can get past the familiarity of Oprah Winfrey’s television talk show host persona, hers is an equally fine performance as Gloria Gaines, Cecil’s loyal (to a point) wife, who wages her own internalised struggle with her husband’s perceived position of immense privilege with which he appears to do nothing. As she watches her eldest son Louis (an excellent David Oyelowo) risk his life as a political activist, Winfrey absolutely nails Gloria’s constant (and equally duty bound) battle to hold to the love and respect she feels for her husband.

Daniels certainly takes his time telling this fascinating story. And what it lacks in the passion and brilliance of Daniels’s own Precious or Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988), it makes up for with its quiet contemplation about how people with different points of view can find common ground and change the world.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.