The Butler (2013)
Directed by Lee Daniels
Cecil Gaines was a sharecropper's son who grew up in the 1920s as a domestic servant for the white family who casually destroyed his. Eventually striking out on his own, Cecil becomes a hotel valet of such efficiency and discreteness in the 1950s that he becomes a butler in the White House itself. There, Cecil would serve numerous US Presidents over the decades as a passive witness of history with the American Civil Rights Movement gaining momentum even as his family has troubles of its own. As his wife, Gloria, struggles with alcoholism and his defiant eldest son, Louis, strives for a just world, Cecil must decide whether he should take action in his own way.
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Add in a few dirty jokes, including one about a woman asking a gent to stick both his hands up her vagina and clap (well, that one was needed to avoid a PG rating), plus pertinent news clips from each era, and you have The Cosby Show meets Forrest Gump meets Do the Right Thing .
Gaines’ voice is so quiet that it takes him until the 1980s to make a stand for equal pay for blacks on the White House staff — a moment Daniels treats as a watershed, but which seems more like a sad reflection on the slow crawl of racial progress at the seat of government and, by extension, in Hollywood, too, where “Driving Miss Daisy” (which “The Butler” also resembles) was trumping “Do the Right Thing” at the Oscars around the same time Gaines would have been asking for that raise.
Elijah Kelley (“Hairspray,” “Red Tails”) and David Oyelowo (“Lincoln,” “Jack Reacher”) are both strong as Cecil’s teenage sons, one drawn to serve his country in Vietnam, the other to more radical courses of action.
This is no dry dissertation, however, but a deeply moving melodrama of the most honorable type (the script is the first feature written by Danny Strong, based on a Washington Post article by Wil Haygood), its politics and its heart illustrated through Cecil’s relationship with his wife, Gloria — Oprah Winfrey ( The Princess and the Frog ) is magnificent as a woman who’s not entirely satisfied with the life her husband has given her — and his sons, particularly the firebrand political activist Louis (David Oyelowo: Jack Reacher ), with whom the apolitical Cecil frequently clashes.