Skip to main content

The Butler

By


It seems it is never enough to hew a historical line, or in this case biographical line.  Better to make a real figure into a caricature you can easily wrap your own ideas about race and inequality around.  This certainly seems to be the case with The Butler, an odd cross between Remains of the Day and Forrest Gump, with Eugene Allen remade as Cecil Gaines, a White House butler who served 8 presidents between 1952 and 1986.

The New Yorker notes that this is pretty lightweight drama, with Forest Whitaker offering a very restrained portrayal of the butler, in contrast to his fictionalized son who actively takes part in the Civil Rights movement.  Cecil can only watch, quite literally, as he sees his son being arrested on television, and is forced to hold his tongue, as the White House is pretty much portrayed as a "plantation."

Not surprisingly, right-wing pundits have lashed out at this film, notably Reagan's adopted son Michael, who likened the movie to Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet, mostly because he felt the title suited this largely fictionalized account, claiming his father was not a racist as he felt he was portrayed in this movie.

Lee Daniels appears well meaning, but this film seems to be in the contemporary lineage of Driving Miss Daisy and The Help, as he tries to find a populist angle to present his vision of the Civil Rights Movement, with popular actors like Robin Williams, Leiv Schrieber and John Cusack hamming it up as the former presidents.  It would have been much more interesting to get inside Eugene Allen, who is featured in Smithsonian Folkways' Workers at the White House.




Comments

  1. James FergusonAugust 29, 2013 at 6:25 AM

    I see The Butler got a "shout out" from the White House,

    http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk/president-obama-tears-during-lee-daniels-butler-163908974.html

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

The People Debate the Constitution

By
As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified.  After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution.  Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through.  But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 .  The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others.  Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified.  A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.
166 comments
Read more