Directed by:
Lee DanielsCinematography:
Andrew DunnComposer:
Rodrigo LeãoCast:
Forest Whitaker, David Banner, Michael Rainey Jr., LaJessie Smith, Mariah Carey, Alex Pettyfer, Vanessa Redgrave, Aml Ameen, Clarence Williams III (more)VOD (3)
Plots(1)
THE BUTLER tells the story of a White House butler who served seven American presidents over three decades. The film traces the dramatic changes that swept American society during this time, from the civil rights movement to Vietnam and beyond, and how those changes affected this man's life and family. Forest Whitaker stars as the butler with Robin Williams as Dwight Eisenhower, James Marsden as John F. Kennedy, Liev Schreiber as Lyndon B. Johnson, John Cusack as Richard Nixon, Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan, and many more. (official distributor synopsis)
(more)Reviews (3)
The year 2013 brought two notable films that deal with the issue of racism in America. 12 Years a Slave is definitely a more powerful film, but The Butler has the potential to reach more people. It's somewhat more commercial in that it effectively targets emotions in the right way. Forest Whitaker is indeed a brilliant actor, and he can play virtually any role exceptionally well. If it weren't as overly pathetic and political in scope, it might have been better, but nothing can be done about that now. This is a film that was supposed to appeal to the masses. And I think that's what happened. It had a budget of 30 million dollars, which was mainly earned back several times over, especially in America.
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An exciting and ambivalent topic reduced to an educational, touching and flat narrative about the history of the struggle for the emancipation of blacks. It is also ideologically horribly flat and the White House is, over decades, an almost idyllic space of justice, while the KKK in the south represents an excess that is gradually crushed. There is no war, peace everywhere. Yes, we can. Oh, really? Probably fine for schools, but as a film mapping the problem of "black and negro identities" it’s terribly banal. The good news is that the favorite for the Oscars is not this servile supplicant, but instead its slightly tougher black brother McQueen.
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I'll finish the joke for the movie: "...cunt is tight." I'm actually surprised that given how the film has obviously been cut like nine hundred times, and toward a completely different impression, it somewhat connects and makes sense. But any moral ambivalence is definitively abandoned this time around, and instead we're looking at more of an ode to the Democrats along the lines of "Yes we can.... No, you can!" It's painfully obvious that this was supposed to be a very different movie – tougher, more clear-eyed, and uncompromising. See the shootout between the police and the Black Panthers hinted at in the trailer – here the whole organization is reduced to a bunch of theorists from the Jericho cafe. Tarantino could mention the studio's brief use of the three submissive bumps on the skull of Lee Daniels' negro, but I was probably most entertained by the caricatures of the presidents exactly as Blue State sees them – the sympathetic idealist Kennedy, the totally incompetent overgrown child Nixon (I did a spit take at the screen during the first scene with Cusack), or the arrogant outlaw Reagan, who is always lit sharply from the right in the shots to evoke his most famous photo in front of the flag. The film was terribly hurt by downgrading its rating to make it a conscious, educational film and the moderate tone of the film that results, because if I'm going to drive hoards of teenage black men to the cinema, logically I don't want to piss them off. So it's racist.
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