The Butler

A very worthy, pompous and sentimental film, The Butler nevertheless manages to hit the right emotional notes at the right time to frame neatly the guilt, the drama and the occasional incredibly brave spirits of the civil rights struggles in the latter half of the Twentieth Century in the United States – while making Hollywood studios a nice buck, in the time-honoured way.

Superb performances, a string of very pleasant surprises in the casting of successive actors as recognisable US presidents – some of them completely unexpected but actually inspired – and almost all of the heavy-hitting moments of the last sixty years of US history, from the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King to Vietnam, got checked off in the story of one Butler’s long tenure at the White House. Though it sounds like it could have been a fanciful bit of Hollywood invention and many critics have rightly likened it to Forrest Gump, it was based on the life of Eugene Allen, who genuinely did serve in the White House for 34 years, reaching prominence after a Washington Post article and living to see the first black president, though sadly not to see the film based on his life. He may have been uncomfortable with the interpretation in any case – while he was the inspiration for this film, his family life was entirely fictitious, from the traumas of his early childhood on a plantation to his sons highly symbolically going in very different directions, one to serve in Vietnam while the other became a black panther and ultimately a left-wing minor politician

Through the presence of a black man in the White House and the tensions between a father who has come from so little that he thinks his position is incredibly honourable and a son who thinks the black man serving the white is an abhorrent Uncle Tom, but layers of complexity are added with the butler – here named Cecil – gaining enough leverage to begin to fight for equal wages for black and white staff, and a fictitious but excellent quote from the film’s briefly-glimpsed Martin Luther King on the way a ‘black domestic’ can be subversive without knowing it.

There is much to recommend The Butler – the fantastic performances, especially from Forest Whitaker, Cuba Gooding Jr and Lenny Kravitz, and Oprah did her bit nicely too, though I think the filmmakers knew the audience was never going to be suckered into too sentimental a moment with her. I also loved how shellsuits are so perfect a shorthand for a certain era. But if you don’t want to go to the cinema to feel slightly manipulated and preached to, there may be more enjoyable choices.