The Butler Pushes an Obama Fantasy

This is a long, silly fantasy that has some good actors, but it is an overly long, boorish, "docu-drama" that extends long dead injustices from the past into the present. This has a masked destination in mind. Never mind the phony destination. Never mind the film. m/r

The Butler and the Obama Moment | National Review Online
August 18, 2013   By Will Allen
 Lee Daniels’s stylized history says more about us than about the civil-rights era.


‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in 1958, paraphrasing the abolitionist Theodore Parker. From the viewpoint of Lee Daniels’ The Butler, the moral universe of the past half-century is less of an arc and more of a funnel, a smooth and rapid convergence of historical characters and events to a single, defining moment.
Inspired by a 2008 Washington Post profile, The Butler (director Lee Daniels affixed his name after a copyright dispute) traces the career of Eugene Allen, who started work in the White House in 1952 and served eight presidents before retiring in 1986 as maître d’hôtel. The new film from the director of Precious reimagines Allen as butler Cecil Gaines, who witnesses the occupants of the Oval Office making civil-rights history, even as his own son participates in the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham campaign, and the Black Panther Party.
But The Butler is not really about Eugene Allen; that much is clear from the opening seconds, in which the camera drifts over a Georgia plantation while Forest Whitaker intones with quiet majesty, “The only thing I ever knew was cotton.” Never mind that Allen was actually born in Virginia.
Never mind, either, that Allen’s mother and father were not respectively raped and murdered by a cartoonishly brutal white landowner — or that such depredations would not have been casually dismissed in the early 1920s, even if carried out against black sharecroppers.
Daniels and his screenwriter, Danny Strong, waste no time on such niceties. Like an extended version of Billy Joel’s music video for “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” the 132-minute film races through the latter half of the 20th century at vignette speed. Every brief, choppy scene — the parade of fake presidents reciting speeches on grainy Westinghouse TVs, the terse arguments between Cecil and his headstrong son, the reenacted riots interspersed with newsreels from Birmingham and Vietnam — betrays the filmmakers’ impatience. This is a “docudrama” with a destination in mind.

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