Lee Daniels’ The Butler ended up in my queue at my mom’s request. I was not even a little interested in it because I did not know who Lee Daniels was (this is before Empire existed) even though I did see and like Precious. The subject matter and the Tyler Perry-esque title repelled me. When we actually watched it, mom hated it. She primarily gets her news from broadcast TV like ABC, CBS and NBC. The film starts with the image of two hanged black people in Jim Crow South. She spat, “I did not know this was a slavery movie. Things like that don’t happen anymore.” Unfortunately she is not right, and I had to dispel her of that notion. Watching the movie with my mom made me appreciate the film more than if I had seen it in theaters.
Your reception of a film depends on your mood when you watch it. It can have multiple messages. On one hand, Lee Daniels’ The Butler is a nakedly ambitious, commercially cynical creation that shows everything that is wrong with Hollywood. On the other hand, Lee Daniels’ The Butler is also a subversive psychological masterpiece about the generational divide created by trauma that fractures one family and reveals the staying power of the real functional leaders behind the scenes in American society.
Lee Daniels’ The Butler is a fictionalized account inspired by the real life of Eugene Allen who worked as head butler at the White House for 34 years, from 1952 through 1986. Forrest Whittaker plays Cecil Gaines the titular fictional character. Unlike Allen, Gaines’ life is way more stereotypically dramatic and exploitive: super racist things happen in the first five minutes, he gets saved from a life of crime, his wife is an alcoholic, he loses someone that he loves to the Vietnam War, his son is blackety black politically. The time span of his service allows the film to depict pivotal American historical events and multiple notable historical characters, which gives Daniels the opportunity to feature multiple well-known actors, have multiple mini-period films in one and increase the commercial appeal of his movie.
Lee Daniels’ The Butler begins with a lynching and ends with Obama. The film’s trajectory rests on the resolution of racism in the country so its divisive effect on the Gaines’ family can finally heal. Cecil presents as a conservative, conciliatory black man, but the viewer has the benefit of seeing his childhood and hearing his internal monologue, which reveals his thoughts. If your life starts out with a family destroyed at the whim of a degenerate who will shoot your dad for even speaking to him after raping your mom, you understandably learn to keep your mouth shut to survive. If the kindest person is a person who verbally abuses you and makes you spend more time with the rapist murderer, every other person after that seems alright, especially if that person gives you a job and is at least superficially concerned with civil rights.
David Oyelowo plays his son, Louis, who is disgusted by his father’s subservience and sees him as a coon. His journey is like Forrest Gump for black people. His activist career reflects the evolution of the civil rights movement from the 1950s through 1970s: SCLC nonviolent sit-ins to protest segregation and demand voting rights, Freedom Riders, then Black Panthers. Cecil is an adherent to respectability politics and is horrified that his son has a police record. Cecil cannot believe that his son fails to sees the progress.
As they both get older, they start from opposite ends of the political spectrum and misunderstanding until their political paths intersect as they get older, which enables them to find common ground. Culturally black power becomes more commercially acceptable. The Gaines couple don Afros for a night on the town, but derided it earlier when his son and his girlfriend sported the real deal. Cecil becomes more radical as he sees economic injustice as a crucial subset of racial inequality and realizes that his son’s police record is actually a badge of honor. Louis realizes that his father’s respectability politics has value in broader society to change prejudice and influence powerful people, i.e. the presidents who are depicted throughout the film. He decides to join the system and enter politics. Both men regret how much time they lost thinking poorly of the other. Racism’s deleterious effects do not stop at the door of any home.
Lee Daniels’ The Butler is less successful at its stab at The Feminine Mystique, which does not address intersectional issues of sexism and racism. Oprah Winfrey, who gets the best lighting, makeup and wardrobe of any woman in the film because of course, she is Oprah Winfrey, plays the titular character’s wife. She does not have to work, which is seen as a positive, but her boredom and her alienation from her husband because of his job’s confidentiality requirements and from her sons because of the aforementioned events is a gateway to alcohol abuse and potential infidelity with Daniels’ regular Terrence Howard. While Winfrey is magnetic, her story does not fully embody the every black woman experience that Cecil and Louis do for black men in the movie. Most black women had to work and maintain the home, but Mrs. Gaines’ struggle is more representative of the suburban white woman struggle of the 1950s.
While Lee Daniels’ The Butler is an ambitious work, it ultimately pulls hopeful punches about the trajectory of our nation’s love hate relationship with racism. As we know, Obama’s election did not mean that racism was over. It just meant that people thought that by voting for a black man, no more work needed to be done and any suggestion otherwise elicited a fury that resulted in a political apocalypse that has led us to a kakistocracy today. If Allen had lived longer and Daniels made this movie today, there would be no tidy, happy ending.