Why Conservatives Should Appreciate “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”

Posted on August 19, 2013 at 4:20 pm

I highly recommended my friend Rebecca Cusey’s very thoughtful essay on Patheos, Hey Conservatives, Don’t Blast ‘The Butler’ (From a Conservative). I am strongly opposed to reducing complex human stories to us-vs-them political bullet points (indeed, opposed to us-vs-them political bullet points of any kind). As Cusey points out, this is particularly foolish and inconsistent with “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” which is inspired by the true story of a man who served as a butler in the White House for eight Presidents, over a period that included the tumult of the Civil Rights Era.

The first reason that conservatives should like this movie is that its main character upholds core conservative principles of self-reliance, honor, hard work, and devotion to family. Of course, these are liberal values as well, but right now we are focusing on the “conservative” criticisms that Cusey rebuts so resoundingly. The movie makes the point that the butler and his son each devote their lives to service, an idea that should be embraced by people of all political views, even Libertarians, who may say they are acting only out of self-interest but who in their own way are trying to make the world more equitable. Cusey writes:

We need more, not less, of this in our culture because exploring the African-American experience through film is exploring our shared history and creates a conversation we all can share.

The conversation will not go very far if we conservatives immediately overreact to perceived slights in an excellent film.

The skill of the screenplay and direction in The Butler make it clear that the political views in the movie flow from and are expressions of the characters in the film. The movie itself does not make judgements on any of the presidents, but some of its characters sure do. And some of the characters disagree with each other.

That’s called good movie-making.

I think it is a beautiful and moving film for anyone to enjoy. Even whites. Even conservatives. Especially white conservatives. Try to understand the other side a little. Buying a movie ticket isn’t conceding every political point made by a character in the movie. It is simply learning.

Let me repeat that last point for emphasis.

Buying a movie ticket isn’t conceding every political point made by a character in the movie. It is simply learning.

In the first place, this movie in no way attacks conservative principles or those who espouse them. In the second place, even if it does, the way to respond is with empathy and respectful engagement. I found the movie’s portrayal of the Reagans to be very sympathetic. Some of the critics (not professional movie critics, just people who have expressed views about the movie) wanted it to be more laudatory. But Reagan, as all of the Presidents portrayed, was a complex figure who was not always willing to take on issues that in retrospect we might have wished him to, and apartheid was one of them. That is a historical fact. So were lynchings, which were frequent in the early 20th century and even proudly featured on postcard souvenirs. Thoughtful, sincere films like this one are intended to start conversations about ideas and experiences.

Cusey concludes her essay with a thought I wish everyone shared:

I maintain that every conservative should see this movie. Sure, there are things about which I disagree, but so what? It is excellent and we just might find we understand each other a bit better afterwards.

Interview: Cuba Gooding, Jr. of “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”

Posted on August 16, 2013 at 3:58 pm

I spoke to Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding, Jr. about his role in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” as Carter, a colleague and friend of Cecil, the character played by Forest Whitaker.

My favorite scene with your character is when you had to post bail for Cecil’s son, Louis.

The whole idea behind it and reason I was so attracted to this screenplay was that it is an expose of the times all the way back from slavery to the inauguration of Barack Obama, and specifically the turmoil of the era after JFK and Martin Luther King were assassinated. There were different thoughts about how best to respond to racism. One was the view of Martin Luther King, Jr. mindset that we should be seen as accessible and approachable and lead by example, and the other more aggressive frame of mind, the “by any means necessary” views of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. What’s beautifully expressed in this movie is how it doesn’t alienate people but shows these two approaches in a way that’s accessible and open and un-opinionated. That’s what makes Lee Daniels such a brilliant director. I always say to him, “If Spike Lee did this movie, no one would see it. He would have had his opinions and his personal beliefs encroaching on it. As a gay, black filmmaker, there is so much truth in his life that Lee’s willing to expose. There will be raw and uncomfortable moments because he does not know anything but the truth. And in that scene, you have Carter, a butler who is forced to wear a certain face to those around him, dignitaries, he has to be professional to the nth degree. Louis is trying to find his way with a more aggressive stance. But he knew he could come to Carter because they had a relationship. My character is there to show that even though they had to act in a particular way, they had to be representative of something they were still human. That is a very humanistic scene, so people can identify that this is a family with very real issues.

Yes, your character had an upstairs face and a downstairs face.

I fell in love with the idea of doing this script when Lee sent it to me five or six years ago. This is a powerful, encompassing tale of what African-American men have been dealing with since the formation of this country. I’m a huge fan of boxing and I have studied the history of pugilism. When Jack Johnson was the first black heavyweight. He was dominating boxers. He was only looking to fight white boxers because they wouldn’t fight him. When they finally did get rid of him, they looked for any opportunity and finally found it. It took 40, 50 years for another black champion to come along because it was like “we’re not going to have that scenario again.” And then came Joe Louis. Was he any less talented or ferocious? No. But he knew he had to act different to be accepted. He was the polar opposite of everything Jack Johnson did. That’s what makes this movie great. You have these butlers who have to be “invisible in the room — the room should feel empty with them in it,” as it says in the script. That is their job. And then there are the locker room scenes, which are full of life! You see that these were living, breathing, powerful men. And that is why being in this film has been such a blessing.

That’s one of the reasons the first scene with Richard Nixon is so meaningful — he comes into the kitchen, the private, backstairs, backstage space.

My favorite scene!

What do you hope the teenagers and who are too young to remember the 60’s and 70’s will get from this film?

There’s such a disconnect with today’s youth in understanding the atrocities that happened on American soil. That’s how “Django Unchained” can be a huge hit because they aren’t identifying what it really meant to be a slave, to watch a man rape your wife and allow it to happen. This next generation of kids will be making decisions for us and they’re not up to date on understanding the past. It’s horrifying to me. I want people to talk in the car on the way home — about the love story or about the freedom riders or about the politics. As long as they’re talking, we know we did our job.

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Actors Interview

Interview: David Oyelowo of “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”

Posted on August 16, 2013 at 8:00 am

David Oyelowo (“Red Tails”) plays the son of the title character in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.” Louis is a rebellious young man who becomes deeply involved in the 1960’s and 70’s struggle for equal rights, first through sit-ins and voter registration and then with the Black Panthers. His estrangement and reconciliation with his father, a White House butler, is the heart of the film.

Your character aged over decades and you seemed very specific about the choices you made in showing that the character was getting older.

When Lee Daniels approached me about playing the role I was very clear that I really wanted the opportunity to play it all the way through. Early on, he was thinking about splitting it with a younger actor. But I had played Henry VI on stage, and he goes from age 14 to his sixties. I learned just how much you can depict through the eyes, the body movement, what’s going on emotionally. Even moreso on film than in the theater because you have the eyes, the small gestures that indicate a wealth of experience or a lack of that. I had to employ more technical aspects over the three month shoot. I would sleep for 10 hours the night before I had to play a teenager and I’d sleep four or five hours when I had to play older. I’d go to the gym to shed weight very quickly to play the younger character and I’d eat a lot of salty food and drink a lot of water that bloats me out to play the older character. All of those things help as well. But when you have a good script that goes to the heart of what a character’s going through at any time that helps with the details.

How did you and Forest Whitaker, who plays your character’s father, work together to develop that relationship?

We didn’t spend a lot of time talking through it as that was appropriate because what you’re seeing for a lot of the movie is a disconnect. The generational divide manifests because they are both products of their environment. He grew up in the South and grew up with lynching and saw his father shot before his eyes. That’s entirely different to my character’s experience, a middle-class upbringing, and my life by comparison is a lot nicer. But the inequality that we both suffered, the injustice that is intrinsic to American society is undeniable and something that we both feel a need to fight but in very different ways. We both felt a need to just trust that as we go on very separate paths, the payoff is going to be at the end of the movie, a shared appreciation of each other’s journey toward what was effectively the same goal. It was that butting of heads internally that led to the combustive elements that led to bringing about irrevocable change, that internal argument about what it is to be a man, a woman, a human being in America regardless of the color of your skin.

You are from Great Britain and much of this happened before you were born. What did you do to research the era?

You name it, “Eyes on the Prize,” many books. One of the great things about the era is that it is in living memory for lots of people who are able to be very articulate about it. The resources personally for me as an actor were infinite. Can one person really go through all those things? Yes, there are people who were at the sit-ins and rode on the bus and went into politics. My character is a composite but he represents the experience of real people.

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Actors

Lee Daniels’ The Butler

Posted on August 15, 2013 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some violence and disturbing images, language, sexual material, thematic elements and smoking
Profanity:	Some strong language, n-word and other racist epithets
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and alcohol abuse, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Peril and violence including police brutality, lynching, murder, rape (off-camera), sad deaths
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	August 16, 2013
Date Released to DVD:	January 13, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00EV4EUT8

Washington Post reporter Wil Haygood was covering the 2008 Obama campaign when some young black women told him that they were going to vote for America’s first major party Presidential candidate who was African-American, even though their fathers told them not to. The generational chasm that separated the fathers who were not ready to see one of their heritage in the White House and the daughters who were inspired him to check to see whether there might be someone in the White House itself who was of that older generation. He found one, Eugene Allen, who had been a butler in the White House from the Truman administration to the Reagan administration, and who was planning to vote for Barack Obama, and Haygood wrote an article telling his story.

That story inspired this film, with Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, born on a plantation in the Jim Crow south and serving eight Presidents while raising two sons. Like the young women Haygood met, the next generation had very different ideas and aspirations. The conflict between a man whose job was to serve by being “invisible in the room” had sons who wanted to be anything but invisible. As Sidney Poitier said to Roy Glenn in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” in 1967, “Dad, you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.”

There are some awkward moments in trying to get through so much material so quickly, with just brief glimpses of some of the Presidents and some of the events. By the time we figure out that it is Robin Williams playing President Eisenhower, painting a landscape as Cecil serves him from a silver tray, his appearance is over. John Cusack has two juicy scenes as Richard Nixon. As the eager, if socially clumsy Vice President, he visits the kitchen to hand out buttons and ask the staff what issues are important to them. “As members of the Negro race,” he intones, as though they do not know who they are, “what are your biggest concerns?”

Later, Cecil sees the President unraveling under the impeachment proceedings. James Marsden has some of President Kennedy’s charisma, and Minka Kelly is lovely and utterly heartbreaking as Jackie, sobbing in the pink suit covered with blood that she could not bring herself to remove. Liev Schreiber shows us President Johnson’s swagger, leaving the bathroom door open so he can talk to his aides while he is on the toilet. Presidents Carter and Ford are seen only in brief archival footage, but Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda are both excellent as the Reagans, shown with more warmth and humanity than the caricatures we might expect.

This cavalcade of star power is just the frame. Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong (Danny Siegel on “Mad Men”) put the human story at the center of the tumultuous historic changes from the late 1950’s to the first decade of the 21st century. That gets a little didactic and clumsy. Cecil Gaines is given two sons, Louis (David Oyelowo of “Red Tails”) and Charlie (Elijah Kelley of “Hairspray”), so that Louis can become involved in the Civil Rights movement, from sit-ins to freedom rides, and then the Black Panthers and anti-apartheid, while Charlie goes to fight in Vietnam. But sensitive and heartfelt performances and the ultimate recognition by the characters that despite their estrangement, the connection between Cecil and Louis is powerful and unbreakable makes their reconciliation hit home. There is a distracting and unnecessary detour into the relationship between Cecil’s wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and a neighbor (Terrence Howard). And the cameos by big stars as the Presidents are distracting — and a grim reminder that even powerhouses like Winfrey, Whitaker, and Daniels and a relatively modest budget were not enough to get a Hollywood greenlight without some white stars. Some of the best scenes are when we see the African-American characters away from the “other face” they have to show whites, relaxed and joking in the White House locker room (Cuba Gooding, Jr. Lenny Kravitz) and or at neighborhood parties.

Ultimately, this is Cecil’s story. When he was a child, service was a chance to get out of the cotton field. In his first job away from the plantation, he learns to present a pleasant, respectful, and helpful face to the customers, to “make them feel not threatened,” to look at them only to “see what they need.” And he learns to stop using the n-word about himself or anyone else. When he comes to the White House, he is told, “You hear nothing. You see nothing. You only serve.” As for the issues, when it comes to the staff, “We have no tolerance for politics at the White House.”

While Louis and his friends are staging a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter, his father is serving dignitaries, wearing white gloves and a tuxedo. But all the courage and determination Louis shows in his passionate commitment to equality don’t reach the power of the moments when Cecil challenges the long-standing tradition of paying the African-American staff of the White House 40 percent less than the white staff, and not allowing them the opportunity for promotion.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness,” the movie’s opening epigraph from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King tells us. “Only light can do that.”

Parents should know that this film includes strong language, drinking, drunkenness, and alcohol abuse, sad deaths, peril and violence including police brutality, rape, murder, lynching, racial epithets, sexual references and non-explicit situations.

Family discussion: Talk to members of your family about their own experiences before and during the Civil Rights era and read about some of the people and incidents mentioned in this movie, including Emmett Till, Pablo Casals, and James Lawson.

If you like this, try: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, “Eyes on the Prize,” and “The Remains of the Day” and the books The Butler: A Witness to History and White House Butlers: A History of White House Chief Ushers and Butlers

The Real Story: “The Butler” and the Real Man Who Served Eight Presidents

Posted on August 12, 2013 at 3:59 pm

“Lee Daniels’ The Butler” has Forest Whitaker as a man who worked for eight Presidents in the White House from the time of Jim Crow segregation to the Civil Rights era. It was inspired by the real-life story of Eugene Allen, who came to the White House to work for Harry Truman and stayed on through Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Just before Barack Obama was about to become America’s first black President, Washington Post reporter Wil Haygood thought it would be interesting to talk to a black employee in the White House “from the era of segregation.” He found Allen, and wrote “A Butler Well Served,”

When he started at the White House in 1952, he couldn’t even use the public restrooms when he ventured back to his native Virginia. “We had never had anything,” Allen, 89, recalls of black America at the time. “I was always hoping things would get better.”

Allen wore a tuxedo on the job and often worked six days a week. He was proud that he never missed a day. When he retired, President and Mrs. Reagan invited him to a State dinner. As a guest. He was able to vote for Barack Obama in 2008. He died in 2010.

The new all-star film fictionalizes the details but has Forest Whitaker as a butler based on Allen and Oprah Winfrey as his wife, with history happening all around them, affecting time, sometimes in contrast to what their family experiences.

For more details, read Haygood’s new book about Eugene Allen, The Butler: A Witness to History.

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The Real Story