Long before Barack Obama was elected President, before Colin Powell and Condi Rice held such powerful positions, and even before the civil rights movement—before African-Americans could safely sit at the front of the bus—there was a black man in the White House. Sometimes even in the Oval Office.
His name was Eugene Allen, and he served as a butler at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from 1952 until retiring in 1986. Three and a half decades, eight presidents. Allen started as a “pantry man” near the end of Truman’s presidency as a nation continued to heal from WWII—and as the Cold War was just heating up. And he stayed on till Reagan’s second term, retiring as head butler just a year before the Cold War came to an end.
But it was those tumultuous years and administrations between that were most memorable—especially for a black man—as America churned its way through racial strife, civil rights, and slowly toward some semblance of equality. Along the way, Allen observed—from the White House kitchen, its corridors, its state dinners, and even the Oval Office itself—the Little Rock school crisis, the 1963 March on Washington, Brown v. Board of Education, and all those assassinations. JFK. Bobby. MLK Jr.
In early November 2008, just before Obama was elected for his first term, Allen told The Washington Post that he “shook the hand of all the presidents I ever worked for.” Allen reminisced for hours with The Post, resulting in an article that found its way to a Hollywood exec, who immediately saw its potential for a feature film. After numerous fits and starts, the project ultimately ended up with screenwriter Danny Strong, who penned a fictional story based on Allen’s life. And then it ended up with director Lee Daniels, who had just garnered widespread acclaim for Oscar-winning Precious.
The result is Lee Daniels’ The Butler, a film that’s already getting some early Oscar buzz. The movie shines despite its clunky title—which apparently isn’t as vain as it might seem. Daniels had nothing to do with the title; in fact, he dislikes it. But Warner Bros. owns the right to a 1916 short film called The Butler, and wouldn’t allow Daniels or his distributor, The Weinstein Co., to use that title. Expressing his frustration at having his name on the marquee, Daniels told The Hollywood Reporter, “I don’t want to say ‘look at me.’ I’m not ready for people to look at me.”
He needn’t worry. Audiences will be too busy looking at a star-studded cast—especially Forest Whitaker in the title role and Oprah Winfrey as his wife—to notice the man behind the camera. But make no mistake: Daniels’ fine skills are on full display, and though he had a bigger budget than for Precious ($10 million for that, $25 million for this), he has maintained some of the indie-feel, gritty storytelling style that made Precious so powerful. Some, but not all. Sentiment, schmaltz, and soaring strings—important historical moment alert!—occasionally get in the way. But mostly, the movie moves along nicely, taking us down a historical road we may have been down before, but from a unique perspective: What does a nation in turmoil look like through the eyes of a servant who spent countless hours in the room with the President of the United States?
They’ve changed the name and some of the details about the title character’s story—here, he’s Cecil Gaines, not Eugene Allen. But the ever-reliable Whitaker, in what I believe is at least worth an Oscar nomination, gives a stellar performance—likely his best since winning the Academy Award for 2006’s The Last King of Scotland, in which he played the tyrant Idi Amin. Here, Gaines is the complete opposite of Amin: soft-spoken, mild-mannered, apolitical. He shuns the spotlight, working from the sides and the shadows. And while Amin ruled with an iron fist, Gaines serves with a gentle, white-gloved touch. This particular “inspired by a true story” butler is committed to his job, to integrity, to excellence, and to the administrations he works for.
Whitaker totally inhabits the part as we see him age from a 30-something rookie to an almost 90-year-old man at the end of the film; kudos to the makeup team, yes, but Whitaker practically makes you feel the weight of the years along with him. (In a Q&A after the screening I attended in Atlanta, Whitaker said he often felt older than his 52 years, noting that “I aged with the character” and that “I felt the weight in my eyes and my body.” But Whitaker’s eyes were probably baggy for another reason: They often worked 14-to-18-hour days to keep the project within budget. The entire film was shot in just 41 days.)
Oprah, as Clarence’s wife Gloria, holds her own with a fine cast that also includes Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Alan Rickman, Jane Fonda, Robin Williams, Liv Schreiber, and more. Winfrey is convincing as a woman who is committed to her husband, and yet wishes he’d spend less time at the office; who loves her family, but doesn’t hesitate to slap her grown son when he’s out of line; who is committed to faith, but struggles with alcohol abuse and sexual temptation.
It’s fun to watch the parade of presidents along the way, seeing familiar actors occupy the roles—Williams as Eisenhower, James Marsden as (an unconvincing) Kennedy, Schrieber as LBJ, John Cusack as Nixon, and Rickman as Reagan. (Yes, Professor Snape channels Ronald Reagan—and it totally works.) And Fonda is spot-on as Nancy Reagan, bringing sweetness to one of the film’s more touching scenes.
But the heart and soul of this movie belongs to those middle years, when the nation is in turmoil during the civil rights movement. Cecil’s character wants to see better conditions for African-Americans, of course, but he is hardly an activist, and prefers to maintain a low profile and turn the other cheek—partly because of his position in the White House. But he also prefers to keep his head down as a survival tactic; as a child, he saw his mother raped and his father murdered by white men.
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Every good film needs conflict and tension, and here it’s played out not just in what’s going on throughout the nation, but under Cecil’s own roof, where his oldest son Louis (David Oyelowo) becomes quite the activist—first peacefully, marching for his rights, jumping on a bus with the Freedom Riders, and marching with Dr. King. But then, after King is shot, Louis becomes more of a zealot, joins the Black Panther movement, and is ready to rumble. Cecil frowns upon his son’s activism, mostly because he’s worried about his safety, and it causes a rift between them—indeed, a wide gulf which literally separates them for years. It’s a nice set-up for a prodigal story, and it feels organic, unforced, and plays itself out nicely.
The film’s most riveting scene comes during a time when Louis is committed to more peaceful measures, to the kind of civil disobedience first preached by Gandhi and later adopted by King and his followers. (Indeed, the movie opens with a title-page quote from MLK: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that.”) Louis and some friends stage a peaceful sit-in at a whites-only counter at a Southern diner, only to be mocked, spit upon, and savagely beaten by a posse of rednecks. The scene is juxtaposed against one in the White House, as Cecil and the serving staff, in their tuxedoes and white gloves, set a glistening table—silver and gold, linens and crystal—for the President and his cabinet. The camera cuts back and forth between the mayhem and madness of the diner, and the serene calm and glitz of the White House dining room. It’s quite powerful.
Watching the film made me wonder about some of the actors’ own personal experiences with racism and injustice, so after the Atlanta press screening, I asked Daniels and Whitaker if they had any stories to tell.
Daniels, born in 1959, doesn’t remember the turmoil of the early ’60s, but recalled going to a mostly-white junior high school where “I had eggs thrown at me and was called nigger.” Daniels added, “Today, racism is very subliminal. I live in New York, and there are times I can’t get a taxi. It chips away at your self-esteem; it’s a very insidious thing.”
(Daniels is also gay, and has experienced hatred on that front as well, though he didn’t discuss it at the Atlanta screening. But in a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Daniels says he was “bullied in the black community . . . because I was gay. They’d say, “Faggot, faggot, faggot!,” and I was too afraid to go to the bathroom . . . because I was bullied.”)
Whitaker, meanwhile, had been a victim of apparent racial profiling as recently as earlier this year, when he was falsely accused of shoplifting and frisked in a New York deli. After the Atlanta screening, he said he had been falsely arrested many times over the years, including his growing-up days in Los Angeles. “I know what it’s like to be hauled out of your car and thrown across the hood of a car,” he said.
While discussing racism, Daniels admitted to harboring anger, while Whitaker seemed more conciliatory. And no wonder: He is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Peace and Reconciliation, and co-founder of the International Institute for Peace at Rutgers University.
Both traits—Daniels’ anger and Whitaker’s pacifism—are on display throughout Lee Daniels’ The Butler . . . sometimes starkly, sometimes subtly. You can see it on the screen, and you can feel it from behind the camera. It’s a story worth telling, and a film worth seeing.
Mark Moring is a copy writer at Grizzard Communications, where he writes for nonprofit organizations, and an Editor at Large at Christianity Today magazine, where he supervised pop culture coverage for years. He and Nina, parents of two fine young men named Peter and Paul, live in the Atlanta suburbs, where the whole family loves watching movies.