A review of Lee Daniel’s The Butler

E. Ablorh-Odjidja

September 03, 2013

The movie The Butler, by Lee Daniels, is a finely crafted one. Lee, the director, is a highly creative spirit and without a doubt among the best in Hollywood.

The acting by all performers is superb and believable, starring Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and others.

That said about the movie, underneath it all is the motive: Lee Daniel’s “The Butler” is a paean to Obama and the liberal cause, produced by the Weinsteins, the liberal left, and anti-right-wing politicians.

The storyline tracks the civil rights movement in the life story of Cecil Gaines, who served as White House butler, spanning the tenures of eight presidents; Republicans and Democrats.

The movie culminates with the election of Obama as the first African American president of the United States; upholding correctly Obama’s ascendancy as the fulfillment of the dreams of millions of Black persons.

If the story was left there, the movie would have gained a remarkable, honest achievement in movie history.  But this is not what happens in the movie.

As time passes by on the screen, the viewer is left to find the narration drift favorably for some presidential characters, all of whom happen to be Democrats.

These presidents appear humane and very compassionate and very supportive of anti-racist causes.

President John Kennedy (JFK), is brought out of a time capsule, as a witness to the moral uprightness of the liberal stance, succinctly narrating the travails of the civil rights movement.

President Johnson, in real life a force of nature, is brought out looking persuasive, genuine, compassionate, even when on a toilet seat at the White House; a quiescent moment for the average man but not one to be wasted by a liberal giant in hot pursuit of justice for Blacks.

The image of Republican presidents, on the other hand, is not so flattering. Nixon, as vice president, becomes a mere caricature.

In the movie, Nixon (John Cusack) visits the butlers’ quarters to announce his candidacy as president in the upcoming campaign against J. F. Kennedy.  He appears insensitive, asks for votes, and leaves his campaign buttons as gifts for his Black underlings.

Nixon, the man who came to be known later as the father of Black capitalism (of course, not in this film), is in this film given a historic back of the hand slap.

The notion left is that Nixon was a racist.  He ordered the surveillance and thus was responsible for the historic killings of Black Panther party members.

And a coded mentioning of the “benign neglect” is also embedded on top of this Black Panter message to make one think that Nixon was never concerned with Black welfare.

What is left unspoken on Nixon's attitude is that the "benign neglect" phrase was meant as an attack on the dire consequences that welfare programs enacted so far had on Black communities.

And when the story gets to Ronald Reagan, it becomes worse.  Regan's memory is not spared for one bit.

Reagan’s wife Nancy (Jane Fonda) invites Cecil Gains (Forest Whitaker) and his wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) as guests to official dinner at the White House.

The invitation is cynically portrayed as huge but empty symbolic patronage of a simple Black man and his wife.

Under Nixon, the Gaines suffer the death of their youngest son (Michael) to the Vietnam War.  By the time it gets to Regan they suffer another loss; the separation of the elder son (Louis) from them.

Historically, Nixon worked to end the Vietnam War, a war started under Kennedy and widened by Johnson, but this information is suppressed in the movie.

How Gaines gets to be a butler at the White House is a key part of the story that is under told by Lee Butler, a Black who is also gender challenged.  

The movie starts on a slave plantation; a property that by any historical reasoning must have been owned by a Democrat. The silence on this aspect of the story is loud, unlike the tendentious excursions into the Nixon purported Black Panthers and “benign neglect”  affairs.

On that plantation a depraved young white man rapes Gaines’ mother. The young Gaines pushes his father to protest. He does and the father is shot point-blank on the forehead and killed .

As consolation for the murder of Gaines' father, the grand old lady of the plantation and the murderer's mother (Vanessa Redgrave) moves young Gaines from fieldwork to the house.

Ironically, the skill Gaines learns in the master's house is to take him from a rustic, racist's plantation to the White House.

Whether the social progression is meant as a metaphor, a prescription for the path to success by Blacks, is left for one to wonder.  But the key point here is that Gaines, after all the tragedy, has his consciousness now up close at the hub of national power where many political issues come to a head.

And this is where Lee takes his license to comment on issues in the Civil Rights movement, in the telling of the biography of Cecil Gaines.

The real Gaines who had seen the worse of plantation life; had his father murdered by a racist and lived in the Jim Crow South, had no rancor on names of the segregationist actors, mostly Southern Democrats.

So Lee chooses to be silent on the real segregationist racists of Gaines era.

Senators Lester Maddox, William Fulbright, Robert Byrd, and Governor Wallace are completely whitewashed out of the story, a story that purports to pay so much attention to the Civil Rights movement.

The caricatured Nixon in real life was no angel. But neither was Johnson or Kennedy on racial matters.

Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1963/4 becomes the seminal point in the telling of the Gaines' story.

About that same time in history, Martin Luther King, Jr., had already been wiretapped by the FBI, at the behest of Robert Kennedy; a fact well known but is never mentioned in Lee's movie, less it sullies the good image it assumes for the Kennedys.

But more important and a rather watershed moment in Black history is ignored; the signing of the Civil Rights Bill of 1957; a signature bill that Martin Luther King, in conjunction with Nixon and President Eisenhower, helped hugely to create.  But Lee finds not space in the movie to tell this story.

This 1957 bill was presented to Congress and was weakened by Democrat opposition in Congress, same as was done to the 1964 Bill of Johnson.  The star opponents of both bills were Senators Fulbright, Richard Russell, Strom Thurman, Gore, Sr., and many more; mostly Democrats. 

Same President Johnson, who in the movie sat on the toilet seat in the movie, had historically acknowledged the “overwhelming support” of Republicans for the bill, at the signing in 1964.  But Lee's movie has no comment on this angle of history.

Lee wants us to believe that Gaines, the butler, who had ears in the White House on issues concerning the course of the Civil Rights movement heard nothing about the 1957 bill and Martin's visit; a visit that ought to cause sensation among the Black butlers.  So Lee is silent on this in the telling of Gaines' story in his movie.

But, Nixon has time in to confide to Gaines in the movie his worries about the approaching Watergate scandal and nothing about any of his triumphs.

His historic trip to Ghana in 1957 that made the 1957 bill possible, for example would have been one of such triumphs. He, Martin and Nkrumah in Ghana at the independence of the first Sub-Saharan new nation, should be one worthy story to tell Gaines, a Black, who was a servant at the White House then. 

But Lee's movie will not allow Nixon to tell anything about this providential moment.

Replace Nixon with Kennedy and this story in Ghana would have been told.  Gaines would have declared the visit "as an act of God," at least to Gloria, his wife in the movie, who is always curious to know how many shoes Jackie Kennedy has!

Does this epic trip to Ghana matter, at least to the Diaspora?  Some explanation is needed for Lee's warped approach to a movie that could have been pivotal in the telling of Black history.

Some might say shucks, it is just a movie. The Weinsteins and the Civil Rights industry might say it’s not just that. It’s a necessity; for them and the real engineers of the Black plight.

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, publisher, www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, September 03, 2013

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