Forest Whitaker is quietly powerful as a White House servant who lived through the long battle for civil rights
On the eve of Barack Obama's election victory in November 2008, the Washington Post tracked down "a story from the back pages of history", that of Eugene Allen, who served in the White House for 34 years before retiring as head butler in 1986. Described as "a figure in the tiniest of print", Allen had been called "Gene" by Truman, talked golf with Ford, been invited to dinner by the Reagans. More importantly, he had seen America change from a segregationist country in which he wasn't allowed to use public lavatories in his native Virginia to a superpower ruled by its first black president.
Defined in appropriately woolly terms as "inspired by the true story", Lee Daniels's star-studded screen adaptation of Wil Haygood's article plays fast and loose with the facts, with screenwriter Danny Strong conjuring a grand historical conceit in which our central character becomes a cipher for the changing fortunes of African Americans in the 20th century.
Thus, the fictional Cecil Gaines lives an extraordinary life that takes him from the cotton fields of Macon, Georgia (where his mother is raped and his father shot) to the corridors of the White House (where only the serving staff are black) via an apprenticeship that teaches him to first embrace and then to reject the term "house nigger" as servitude turns toward empowerment.
En route he sees Eisenhower face down the segregationists of Arkansas; tends to a blood-splattered Jackie Kennedy in the wake of JFK's assassination; hears Nixon blather drunkenly about Watergate; watches Reagan stubbornly veto sanctions against apartheid South Africa.
His two sons (another invention) serve equally symbolic roles, one fighting for Uncle Sam in Vietnam, while the other follows first Martin Luther King and later Malcolm X in the ongoing war at home. Scenes of Gaines standing in silent service while his eldest boy stands in the front line of the civil rights struggle (he's right there in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in April 1968) give subtlety short shrift. This is a film that wears its message on its sleeve, leaving no dramatic connection unmade, no heartstring untugged, no melancholically uplifting piano key untinkled.
In terms of structure and sentimentality, The Butler owes a weighty debt to Forrest Gump, which similarly won the hearts of mainstream American audiences while drawing howls of derision from sniffy liberal critics. Yet Gump was a broadly comedic character whose role in history was laughably accidental. The Butler has no such element of satire, unusually for Daniels, whose previous film The Paperboy was an audaciously rude and overripe slice of steamy southern gothic that positively cackled with mischievous glee.
Absent, too, is the unflinching brutality of Precious, with Daniels apparently reining himself in to court the widest possible audience. "There's no sexual content, little profanity, and the violence is at a minimum though we're dealing with a very violent period in time," he admits with a hint of apology, as if conceding that The Butler has been polished more heavily than the cutlery to which its subject is seen endlessly and subserviently tending. Like Forest Whitaker's character, this is a film that goes out of its way not to cause offence, never to raise its voice or startle the horses.
Yet for all its sticky-sweet flaws and all too on-the-nose contrivances, there is still genuine passion (if not anger) in this fanciful retelling of contemporary history. Scenes of Gaines's home life bristle with energy, thanks in large part to the winning presence of his wife, Gloria, played with fortitude, affection and plenty of oomph by Oprah Winfrey, who took a key role in promoting Precious. You get the feeling that Daniels is far more interested in the unruly Gloria than the buttoned-down Gaines; certainly there's no judgment passed on her drinking, her smoking, even her affairs, all of which seem reasonable in the face of her husband's increasing absence, and none of which diminish the love that underwrites their still sturdy marriage.
While Whitaker handles the painful process of becoming an absence (the key to the butler's invisible art) with skill and precision, Winfrey gets to fill the room, her character being depicted with the generosity and complexity of one who is the real heart of the drama. (Haygood's original article was similarly enamoured of Allen's real-life wife Helene, observing that "her voice is musical, in a Lena Horne kind of way", her guiding presence powerfully felt throughout.)
The key ensemble cast are on fine form too, with Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr making the most of small but significant supporting roles as the Gaines' (too?) close companions, Lenny Kravitz positively bristling in a tux, and David Oyelowo as Cecil's son nailing it in a series of thumbnail sketches of increasingly radicalised youth. As for the rogues' gallery of celebrity cameos, early fleeting appearances by Mariah Carey and Vanessa Redgrave give way to Robin Williams as a fretful Eisenhower, John Cusack as a nosy Tricky Dicky, Alan Rickman as an oily Ronald Reagan and Jane Fonda in a walk-on as haughty/naughty Nancy.
It's a veritable star-spangled jamboree. And through it all, Whitaker keeps his powder admirably dry, carefully negotiating the space between the shadows and centre stage, speaking volumes through understatement, making a very admirable fist of the least starry "starring" role in recent mainstream movie-going memory.
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