The Butler in Three Reviews
The White Review:
If the fact that Oprah is in it isn’t enough to get you to a theater to see a film directed by a black person, let me further make the case here that you should if for no other reason than Lee Daniels has gone through great pains to make a black film for white people. Shout out to the one Random Evil White Guy in a bowling shirt and slacks who shouts “Get out of here nigger!” in every film about racism.
The Black Review:
You all were at the last meeting. You all know we have to buy a ticket for it regardless, so you might as well go see what they’ll be nominating Forest Whitaker for next year.
The Cinephile review:
The ADD version of this review is, “eh, DVD.” Go enjoy the rest of your day.
Whitaker works hard here and Oprah is fine. Most of the casting leaves a lot to be desired, though I did enjoy the 30 second dollops of a trifling Cuba Gooding Jr. here and there. Most of the presidential casting - which is a big draw for this film that’s wasted once you see it, since all of them appear collectively on screen for about 15 of the 132 minutes of the film - is way off: Robin Williams is a serviceable Eisenhower, Alan Rickman is a just-okay Reagan, and Liev Schreiber is a strong Johnson, though more for his affectations than his looks. But Schrieber should have been cast as Nixon and John Cusack should have been outside the studio parking cars. And will we EVER get a JFK that actually looks like JFK? Is it that hard to find someone who can do it? Let’s get Chris Pine in a make-up chair and get it done, Hollywood, jeez.
In BET casting news, Nelsan Ellis is the second best Martin Luther King Jr. I’ve seen (and he could really rival the first - Jeffrey Wright - with a better wig), while Terrence Howard’s mumbling ass appears in a completely unnecessary subplot that goes nowhere. Don’t cry for him though: he’s got plenty of company on the editing floor. Like a number of characters who were so interesting they had to be cut out so that the filmmakers could still call the film The Butler. I at least hope there’s footage on the editing room floor because if the characters in this film were all written the way they more or less appear, Danny Strong needs to stop writing and go back to acting in bad feel-good movies.
A final word on casting, because thinking about the sheer number of wasted characters in this film makes my head hurt: like many directors, Daniels likes to work with a handful of actors over and over. What I can’t figure out is why his crew consists of Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey and Cuba Gooding Jr. Cuba, I understand; he can actually act. But Kravitz mostly stands around looking sleepy, a veritable avatar of the phrase “sleepwalking through a role”; and Carey is in the film a whopping two minutes with maybe one speaking line. They could have saved themselves all kinds of money by hiring any of the extras in the back to do what she did here. My point is, if you’re gonna’ have a crew, at least have a crew of actors. The only reason they don’t spoil the movie is because the writing does that job for them, and they’re hardly on the screen anyway.
The main problem is, of course, the writing. The film lightly bills itself as a black Forrest Gump, with our stalwart Everyman bouncing from experience to experience with world events and dignitaries. The problem is that the character this happens to most in the film isn’t the butler, but his politically viral son Louis, played by the no-joke-in-any-other-film David Oyelowo, sporting the uncanny ability to look every age between 18 and 65 if you make him up right. His character unrealistically appears Zelig-style in almost every major moment of the civil rights movement: he’s on one of the iconic Freedom Riders bus that catches a bomb, ends up on national television after being ousted from a diner sit-in, shows up in a hotel room with Martin Luther King, Jr., and enjoys the finer points of speech-making at an Oakland site of the Black Panthers. This guy sees way more action than the character of his father, who is mostly resigned to serving drinks to five ill-cast versions of the eight presidents he actually served, who barely appear onscreen anyway.
Look: Forrest Gump is the penultimate Almighty Janitor film. Zelig wore the crown proudly for eleven years before everybody’s favorite accidentalist burst onto the screen. Any film that even remotely attempts to straddle eras and historical figures with a single character will be compared to Gump until someone figures out how to top it. The Butler wisely opts out of attempting to unseat the king. It has not, however, stopped them from billing it that way, which is in part why I’m being so hard on it. I have seen Forrest Gump. You, sir, are no Forrest Gump.
Blame it on the kid.
The outlandish circumstances we enjoy in Forrest Gump are able to be enjoyed because Forrest’s story isn’t supposed to be real on any level. It’s a complete fantasy that happens to intersect with actual moments and people in history. The Butler, by contrast, is supposed to be grounded in reality, and because we aren’t familiar enough with Eugene Allen’s story to ascertain how much of this is supposed to be real, we assume it’s at least trying to give us something resembling the truth in more than concept. In short, the expectation bubble is completely different, and we want a story that feels like it belongs in the bubble presented. Unfortunately, every time the magical transporting son of the butler appears at key moments of the front lines of the civil rights movement (in a clear attempt to educate rather than humanize or explore, mind you...yawn), we are knocked out of the bubble. Of course, humanizing people in stories isn’t Daniels’ strength...he prefers to go for the jugular, to shock an audience into awareness. Here it does grave disservice to what impact the movie might have had if it were simply told honestly and better. Focusing on any one of those moments in history could have made the point that needed to be made about the relationship between the son and the father, and by trimming down the number of Where in the World Is Black Power vignettes more time could have been spent expanding and maturing the characters and the story overall. Of course, it’s hard to make a case that the butler would have had much to do with these moments specifically in real life, but that’s why, once you decide you’re going to fictionalize it all anyway, you hire a better screenwriter than Danny Strong. I would have settled for a more Remains of the Day approach to this story than the mish mash of After School Specials I was subjected to in this film.
The Butler is a case of a film that means well, but is doing too much to get any one of the parts right. Is it worth seeing? I think so, though it depends on how much you want to spend on a film that’s flawed to high heaven and having an answer when white people stop you in stores to ask you if you saw it for the next month. And seriously: did we need another so-so film about black servants, no matter how genuine their story might be? That’s a lot of time and money on a story you mostly fictionalized anyway. I mean, “The Help” isn’t even cold to white people yet.
If the fact that Oprah is in it isn’t enough to get you to a theater to see a film directed by a black person, let me further make the case here that you should if for no other reason than Lee Daniels has gone through great pains to make a black film for white people. Shout out to the one Random Evil White Guy in a bowling shirt and slacks who shouts “Get out of here nigger!” in every film about racism.
The Black Review:
You all were at the last meeting. You all know we have to buy a ticket for it regardless, so you might as well go see what they’ll be nominating Forest Whitaker for next year.
The Cinephile review:
The ADD version of this review is, “eh, DVD.” Go enjoy the rest of your day.
Whitaker works hard here and Oprah is fine. Most of the casting leaves a lot to be desired, though I did enjoy the 30 second dollops of a trifling Cuba Gooding Jr. here and there. Most of the presidential casting - which is a big draw for this film that’s wasted once you see it, since all of them appear collectively on screen for about 15 of the 132 minutes of the film - is way off: Robin Williams is a serviceable Eisenhower, Alan Rickman is a just-okay Reagan, and Liev Schreiber is a strong Johnson, though more for his affectations than his looks. But Schrieber should have been cast as Nixon and John Cusack should have been outside the studio parking cars. And will we EVER get a JFK that actually looks like JFK? Is it that hard to find someone who can do it? Let’s get Chris Pine in a make-up chair and get it done, Hollywood, jeez.
In BET casting news, Nelsan Ellis is the second best Martin Luther King Jr. I’ve seen (and he could really rival the first - Jeffrey Wright - with a better wig), while Terrence Howard’s mumbling ass appears in a completely unnecessary subplot that goes nowhere. Don’t cry for him though: he’s got plenty of company on the editing floor. Like a number of characters who were so interesting they had to be cut out so that the filmmakers could still call the film The Butler. I at least hope there’s footage on the editing room floor because if the characters in this film were all written the way they more or less appear, Danny Strong needs to stop writing and go back to acting in bad feel-good movies.
A final word on casting, because thinking about the sheer number of wasted characters in this film makes my head hurt: like many directors, Daniels likes to work with a handful of actors over and over. What I can’t figure out is why his crew consists of Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey and Cuba Gooding Jr. Cuba, I understand; he can actually act. But Kravitz mostly stands around looking sleepy, a veritable avatar of the phrase “sleepwalking through a role”; and Carey is in the film a whopping two minutes with maybe one speaking line. They could have saved themselves all kinds of money by hiring any of the extras in the back to do what she did here. My point is, if you’re gonna’ have a crew, at least have a crew of actors. The only reason they don’t spoil the movie is because the writing does that job for them, and they’re hardly on the screen anyway.
The main problem is, of course, the writing. The film lightly bills itself as a black Forrest Gump, with our stalwart Everyman bouncing from experience to experience with world events and dignitaries. The problem is that the character this happens to most in the film isn’t the butler, but his politically viral son Louis, played by the no-joke-in-any-other-film David Oyelowo, sporting the uncanny ability to look every age between 18 and 65 if you make him up right. His character unrealistically appears Zelig-style in almost every major moment of the civil rights movement: he’s on one of the iconic Freedom Riders bus that catches a bomb, ends up on national television after being ousted from a diner sit-in, shows up in a hotel room with Martin Luther King, Jr., and enjoys the finer points of speech-making at an Oakland site of the Black Panthers. This guy sees way more action than the character of his father, who is mostly resigned to serving drinks to five ill-cast versions of the eight presidents he actually served, who barely appear onscreen anyway.
Look: Forrest Gump is the penultimate Almighty Janitor film. Zelig wore the crown proudly for eleven years before everybody’s favorite accidentalist burst onto the screen. Any film that even remotely attempts to straddle eras and historical figures with a single character will be compared to Gump until someone figures out how to top it. The Butler wisely opts out of attempting to unseat the king. It has not, however, stopped them from billing it that way, which is in part why I’m being so hard on it. I have seen Forrest Gump. You, sir, are no Forrest Gump.
Blame it on the kid.
The outlandish circumstances we enjoy in Forrest Gump are able to be enjoyed because Forrest’s story isn’t supposed to be real on any level. It’s a complete fantasy that happens to intersect with actual moments and people in history. The Butler, by contrast, is supposed to be grounded in reality, and because we aren’t familiar enough with Eugene Allen’s story to ascertain how much of this is supposed to be real, we assume it’s at least trying to give us something resembling the truth in more than concept. In short, the expectation bubble is completely different, and we want a story that feels like it belongs in the bubble presented. Unfortunately, every time the magical transporting son of the butler appears at key moments of the front lines of the civil rights movement (in a clear attempt to educate rather than humanize or explore, mind you...yawn), we are knocked out of the bubble. Of course, humanizing people in stories isn’t Daniels’ strength...he prefers to go for the jugular, to shock an audience into awareness. Here it does grave disservice to what impact the movie might have had if it were simply told honestly and better. Focusing on any one of those moments in history could have made the point that needed to be made about the relationship between the son and the father, and by trimming down the number of Where in the World Is Black Power vignettes more time could have been spent expanding and maturing the characters and the story overall. Of course, it’s hard to make a case that the butler would have had much to do with these moments specifically in real life, but that’s why, once you decide you’re going to fictionalize it all anyway, you hire a better screenwriter than Danny Strong. I would have settled for a more Remains of the Day approach to this story than the mish mash of After School Specials I was subjected to in this film.
The Butler is a case of a film that means well, but is doing too much to get any one of the parts right. Is it worth seeing? I think so, though it depends on how much you want to spend on a film that’s flawed to high heaven and having an answer when white people stop you in stores to ask you if you saw it for the next month. And seriously: did we need another so-so film about black servants, no matter how genuine their story might be? That’s a lot of time and money on a story you mostly fictionalized anyway. I mean, “The Help” isn’t even cold to white people yet.