Review: Lee Daniels' The Butler

Image courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Lee Daniels' "The Butler" is a thoughtful take on race relations and a unique perspective on 50 years of U.S. history that have been well-covered in numerous films during the past few decades.

That's not to say the film is without its flaws. Those familiar with the director's work have likely come to expect a bit of melodrama when watching one of his movies, but "The Butler" is thankfully more "Precious" than it is last year's calamitous "The Paperboy."

In the picture, Forest Whitaker - excellent as usual - plays Cecil Gaines, who, as a boy, witnesses his field hand father murdered by a white man after objecting to his wife being sexually assaulted. Cecil learns to keep his head low and takes up the trade of being a server and, eventually, a butler.

Some might find Cecil's subservience and Forrest Gump-ish willingness to just watch as history rolls by as frustrating, while others may find it particularly moving. In the film's first scene, Cecil is horrified to see what happens when a black man in 1940s America speaks out against injustice - he is killed.

It is that horror that will drive Cecil to continue to keep his head low during decades to come as he eventually lands a butler gig at the White House and listens to five presidents over a period of 30-some years discuss race relations as he serves them their tea, acting as if he were not even in the room.

Cecil's son, Louis ( a solid David Oyelowo), on the other hand, rebels against his father's subservience, first becoming a Freedom Rider and, later, tagging along with Martin Luther King Jr. and, eventually, the Black Panthers.

This father-son relationship provides the true meat of the movie and Daniels does a solid job of showing how each man, in his own way, rebels against the racism they face every day. Louis obviously tackles it in a more head-on kind of way, but he is surprised when King describes to him how black servants play a role in the Civil Rights movement because of their proximity to white people. A scene follows in which Cecil tries, but fails, to convince his employer at the White House that the black staff deserve to receive equal pay.

Much is often made of Hollywood period pieces depicting black people in servant positions and it's easy to see why some might be discouraged by portrayals in "The Help" or "Driving Miss Daisy," despite that those were well-made pictures.

But "The Butler" isn't quite what you might expect. On the one hand, it tells the story of a black man who learned to keep out of the spotlight for fear of reprisal after seeing his father gunned down. On the other, it's a story of a man who struggles with his powerlessness in a country where he does not have equal rights and, ultimately, comes to realize on which side of the struggle he belongs.

Whitaker gives an extremely convincing performance and the supporting cast is pretty solid, including Oprah Winfrey as Cecil's hard drinking wife, Terrence Howard as a lothario and Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz as two fellow White House employees.

The film occasionally stumbles in its portrayals of the leaders of the free world. James Marsden is pretty convincing as John F. Kennedy and Alan Rickman gets Ronald Reagan's speech patterns down well enough. Richard Nixon is the most portrayed president in film history - so, while John Cusack does not necessarily add anything new here, he does well enough.

But Robin Williams was a strange casting choice for Dwight Eisenhower, whom he portrays as strangely effeminate and Liev Schreiber's Lyndon Johnson is just plain odd. The issues are not so much as how the actors play them, but how they are written.

Regardless, the film is surprisingly effective. I thought "Precious" was pretty powerful, despite a few melodramatic flights of fancy, but Daniels' previous film - "The Paperboy" - was a disaster. "The Butler" finds the filmmaker back on track. It is a thoughtful view of American history and one that works on you in ways you might have not expected.