The Butler!

The Butler is a film about the civil rights movement in the United States and the condition of the American negro from the 1920’s on through the beginnings of the presidency of Barack Obama. The film is loosely based on the life of a butler serving in the White House during the second half of the twentieth century.

In point of fact, this is one of the more affecting films about the civil rights movement that we have ever seen. Its unique perspective cast from the view of a black man who served seven presidents from Eisenhower on through Reagan, and his oldest son, who took part in key events in the movement gives it a perspective that we have not previously seen. One can take this as either a civil rights film or a historical account of what went on in the nation’s capital, which ever way one wishes to view it. However, one cannot get away from the vivid images of black people and their struggle for equality during the times that it depicts. From a lunch counter sit in in the south on through what the freedom riders experienced as we see one of their buses burned up after its windows are smashed out by enraged Klu Klux Klan members, this film gives us graphic evidence to counteract what some would like for all to forget. It also gives us images of a White House that is so often behind the curve of events sweeping the nation.

Dwight D. Eisenhower is played very well by the comedian Robin Williams who understates what the real Eisenhower may have faced but gives us a more or less believable account of what the aging general had to confront from his perspective as the commander of a segregated army that spawned his experiences. Eisenhower finally rose to the occasion and did what needed to be done. John F. Kennedy came next and he was described by one of the White House butlers played by Cuba Gooding Jr. as being “smooth, perhaps a little too smooth!� There is nothing smooth about what Cecil Gaines gains from the thirty fifth president when he tells the negro butler who serves him that his son has been arrested sixteen times over the course of two years in attempts to desegregate the south. Kennedy also tells him that what he has learned from his brother Bobby Kennedy and Louis Gaines has changed his heart. Perhaps it is just our personal connection to the Kennedy years but the scene in the White House where Jackie Kennedy is sitting crying her eyes out still clad in her pink dress with all of her slain husbands blood still on it affected us as few scenes have in films that we have seen. Forrest Whitaker, as Cecil Gaines can simply only say that he had not seen so much blood since his father had been shot dead by the plantation overseer after his mother was raped back in the twenties in rural and segregated Georgia.

Richard Nixon is a more or less pathetic figure in this film as he is portrayed as a man in search of votes in the White House pantry among the black employees whom he knows cannot take any part in his political campaign. Perhaps the most humorous segment of the film is the scene when Lyndon Johnson is sitting on the toilet giving orders to his subordinates as Cecil the butler hands him a glass of prune juice for his obvious constipation.. Johnson is later consumed by the Vietnam War but not before he gets the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid 1960’s passed into law. Cecil Gaines and his wife are greatly affected by that war and we see scenes of black people sitting at Arlington Cemetery as Cecil’s son is laid to rest after dying in the conflict that not only divided the nation but also Gaines family as well. Before he goes to Vietnam, Gaines younger son tells his brother that he does not want him looking at his body in his casket before the funeral. Louis Gaines does not come to the funeral which enrages his father who knows nothing of their prior conversation and relationship.

Louis Gaines is a very affecting figure in this film. We see his grow from a 1950’s kid to a man who takes on the south and segregation head on from his beginnings at Fisk University in Tennessee. Louis is a protestor, a freedom rider and, at one time is seen in the hotel room of Martin Luther King Jr. who tells him that his fathers occupation as a butler is very upstanding work and is a part of the protest that blacks are engaged in quietly nation wide. By doing their honest toil, King states, they put to the lie the white man’s belief that they are lazy and shiftless. After King’s death, Louis and his girlfriend join the Black Panther’s but the younger Gaines soon realizes that their call to violence is not for him. He returns to school where he receive a masters degree in political science but still cannot bind up the wounds that span the divide that his father feels toward him because of his past.

Cecil Gaines knows at one point that his son is a member of the black Panthers and hears Richard Nixon say that he has given J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI permission to begin a campaign to wipe them out as a political movement. But Gaines is a White House employee and is sworn to silence.

Gaines employment at the White House ends with the Reagan administration but not before he rectifies a wrong that has persisted into the 1980’s where black employees there are denied promotions and are paid less than what their white counterparts make. After various attempts to convince his boss at the White House to give the blacks equal pay he finally confronts him about it and is told that he will have to move on. Gaines imply looks at the man and tells him that is what he told the president that he would say and that he is to talk to the president (Reagan) about it personally. Gaines becomes a hero among the black servants at the White House and is invited by Nancy Reagan played by Jane Fonda to be their guest at a White House state dinner. Gaines and his wife played by Oprah Winfry go to the function but Gaines sees what it is like to be served by his friends and never really gets over it, ending his employment a short time thereafter after over thirty years on the job.

Those on the political right do not like this film because it tells the truth about Ronald Reagan’s stance on civil rights and apartheid in South Africa. In one scene Reagan is seen with members of his own party who try to convince him to support anti apartheid legislation but Reagan simply says that he is opposed to it and his mind in made up on the subject. After leaving the White House, Cecil Gaines joins his son at a protest as they are reunited where both of them are arrested and jailed for their beliefs. At the end of the film a now old and widowed Cecil Gaines returns once again to the place where he was employed for so long to have one last meeting with another American president. At that meeting with Barack Obama Gaines wears the John Kennedy tie that Jackie Kennedy gave him as she left and the tie clasp that Lyndon Johnson wanted him to have.

This film has many good acting performances but none is better than the one turned in by Oprah Winfry as Cecil Gaines wife Gloria. She is, in turn, an alcoholic and a smoker and briefly a marital cheat and later simply is very proud of her husband for all that he has done. It is a sad part of the film that she does not live to get to vote for Barack Obama after all that she and her husband have been through.

The Butler gives us images from the old south of murder and blacks hanging lynched from poles in the middle of town on through what they went through to gain some measure of equality in this world. It gives us some perspective of what went on in positions of power and how black people were treated even there. It is a film of great hope and despair and the unfinished business that this nation still confronts.

We highly recommend this film!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe