Another butler, his wife, and their son

Louis Gaines (David Oyelowo set upon by dogs during demonstration (2013 The Butler)

Dear friends and readers,

Mr Carson likes being a butler (Downton Abbey); in the poignant Merchant-Ivory movie, The Remains of the Day, Anthony Hopkins is a tragic butler; Hudson (Gordon Jackson) of Upstairs Downstairs fame, loved it; so why shouldn’t Cecil thrive too, except that Cecil isn’t in charge but subject to a white staff manager and, as a black man, makes much less money than white people do in analogous staff roles. I write just in case you’re like me and have not yet gone to The Butler (the hit in our area of the summer) to say don’t miss Danny Strong’s historical bio-pic, The Butler, directed by Lee Daniels.

Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) and Carter Wilson (Cuba Gooding Jr), his peer — kitchen talk

Yes it has flaws. It’s yet another of these pious semi-historical biopics (Lincoln, The Queen, even Hyde Park on the Hudson), where the concluding scene tells us if all is not yet well with respect to the particular injustice the movie is on about, it soon may be, due to the heroism, courage of an elect group and the underlying rightness of our social order no matter how skewed now and again by a few rotten individuals, or, as in this movie, a rotten group of thugs and bigots, half-crazy. (The sort of quiet truth Ang Lee told of the civil war in his genuinely interesting non-cliched, non-stereotyped melancholy Ride with the Devil is rare; what’s more the studios trashed the movie so it never got anywhere.) The Butler also features the usual virtuoso performances of an actor exquisitely impersonating some world historical figure, especially ironic is Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan and on point, Alan Rickman as Reagan. They seemed to be getting a kick out of their roles:

Five presidents, several wives, some famous staff people, well-known (I had almost said stars) politicians and outsiders at the turns of history.

Iconic Kennedys

I might as well tell the worst. The Black Panthers are misrepresented: they were not murderous but genuinely bent on defending blacks from being killed so armed themselves; they were ferociously targeted, smeared, and killed by the FBI; too much slack or leeway is given Reagan: while we are shown how adamantly he worked against civil rights for blacks, he is made very kindly, an easy employer (maybe he was), comically afraid of Nancy. And if for black people the election of Barack Obama signifies limitless possibility for individual blacks lucky enough to find themselves in places where they can try for advancement, in 2 terms the average black person has lost a lot of ground (more impoverished, just an under and unemployed, or harassed, more at risk, draconian prison sentences, abrogation of voting rights, subject to be killed on the streets for being black). I admit I never was an “in” person in any social group during the 60s or 70s so if this or that portrait of someone is awry I might not notice this unless I read about the person and recognize the impersonation.

This is also another upstairs/downstairs movie, and we are with the lowest paid and esteemed of the downstairs. The point is made how much staff there is in the white house.

An over-voice narrator (Cecil) is used: here he tells us look behind those smiles:

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But within these paradigms supposed the way one gets a popular success, and what in the films is adhered to for propaganda by its money-producers and distributors, it’s an effective, centrally accurate (okay the story of Eugene Allen is fictionalized to make it more dramatic) film whose strong purpose seems to be to remind and teach audiences about the terrifying savagery of the whites and their complicit agents and armed forces of the 1960s towards black people seeking a much better life, liberation, not to be humiliated, to a good education, voting rights. The opening sequence about what life was like for black people in the US before WW2 — you had to accept whatever vicious murderous whites imposed on you, for if you didn’t, you found yourself lynched, simply shot (to death), raped (if a woman on a plantation), if you tried to free yourself of plantation life, you found no niches, no connections, no place awaiting you and police everywhere seeking to put you away or out of it. People watching TV today about the sit-ins, freedom rides on buses, marches, demonstrations, see a clip or two of vicious whites beating up, hosing blacks, and then we switch to the big man who brings an end to this. This movie shows that these few minutes of film are thin as melting icefloes; it shows us the long incidents of townspeople acting out cruelty, brutality, killing day in and day out. Black people watching this today will not be fooled that they have full permanent voting rights; this movie tells us at what cost what progress has been made was done. Until near the end the occasional intertwining of real footage (from TV) and voices and photographs (Carter, Jesse Jackson) worked very well.

And until near the end, the tone is (paradoxically) light; most of the time the characters are in domestic situations or quiet social events.

The plot-structure once Cecil gets his job at the white house, follows the drama of the conflicts between Cecil (marvelous delicate performance by Forest Whitaker), his wife, Gloria, a just perfect performance by Oprah Winfrey: I was taken by every facet of it, from her outfits (she does remove her wig at one point), to her anger, to her devotion,

Sending a son to a traditional black college in Tennessee (Cecil would have preferred Howard University)

to her sense of humor, drinking, smoking, having an affair at one point.

I’m now awaiting a star role for her in another movie and the obligatory Oscar. Then their oldest son, Louis: once again David Oyelowo delivers a deeply felt convincing in-depth presence (I’ve now seen him in Small Island, Five Full Days, Lincoln). Central to the film is Louis’s idealistic rebellion which his father cannot understand as he sees Louis’s behavior as risky and useless:

The father and older son

A younger son, Charlies (Isaac White) identifies as American and volunteers to go to Vietnam and dies.

I felt passionately for Louis, exhilarated by Oprah-Gloria and really identified with Cecil during his endurance of invisibility, stigma, low pay (and insults saying to go away if you don’t like it or want decent pay), no promotion and whatever you do (until near the end of the movie) you can trust no one to respect you for your years of work, as a nobody nothing you do counts. What is this but the adjunct’s life I endured for decades. This is not the first time I’ve identified as a black person. Whitaker as Cecil is continually snubbed. He is told early on by Vanessa Redgrave (as the mother of the crazed man who rapes Cecil’s mother and murders his father) as “house nigger” behave as if the space you are in is empty. Every once in a while he breaks code: he attempts to say something consoling to Jackie Kennedy after the assassination of Kennedy: she cries on and then gets up and goes out as if Cecil were not there.

Long hours

If you saw Lincoln, make this film its companion in your memory.

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Worthwhile reviews: David Denby in the New Yorker; A. O. Scott of the New York Times (yes it’s exuberant; marvelous dancing sequences in black American style); Ben Sachs on it as anti-Gump; Steve Boon for Roger Ebert.

At a family celebration which ends in passionate quarreling

No women critics reviewed this film. So: I cried all the way home because I identified with Oprah as the butler’s wife and so envied her her kind protective hard-working long-lived (!) butler husband who she thanks near the end for taking care of her all these years. Oprah I can see appeals to a certain segment of black women and yet can make a direct appeal to lower middle whites too.

The point of view on home life, its emergence as central to the story is a woman’s point of view. Not for nothing was Oprah one of the film’s producers.

Ellen