A movie that feels slightly all-over-the-place but sneaks up on you to create a sum total far greater than its parts.
What Works: The story of Cecil Gaines, a black butler who started out on a horrific cotton farm in the South but became a White House butler for seven different presidents, is just original enough to create a version of history we’ve never quite seen before. It’s the ultimate Upstairs/Downstairs type story refracted through a lens of the Civil Rights movement as Cecil’s eldest son becomes a Freedom Rider and, later on, a black panther. At first, it seems that Forest Whitaker is playing the least interesting character in an overstuffed movie———his butler seems driven only by the next day’s work, and nothing of the larger events going on around him———-but the ending shows him gradually opening up to the world in a way so subtle you might almost miss how cathartic it really is. His tragic past has stunted his life so much that only in the late 80’s can he begin to hope for more.
The cast is chockfull of great supporting turns by actors playing big historical figures, perhaps the best of which are John Cusack as a cagey, deeply ambivalent Nixon (he looks out at the world as something he doesn’t trust) and True Blood’s Nelsan Ellis as Martin Luther King Jr. giving a speech on how butlers are arguably more subversive than subservient. Oprah Winfrey gives a layered performance as Cecil’s wife, torn between a boring life with him and a “wild” side that only leads to depression.
What Doesn’t Work: The director, Lee Daniels, just can’t help himself from adding in extra scenes of racial-sexual hothouse melodrama. Just as he did in the excellent Precious, and the ludicrous Paperboy, he’s never happy to let a scene go by without kicking up the sweaty, lurid subtext of it. For a historical movie, it can risk making things seem a little unrealistic, and not all of the presidential portrayals really work (like James Marsden’s too-glib Kennedy or Liev Schrieber’s cartoonish LBJ). And squeezing in so much history in such a little amount of time can feel like a cliff-notes version of history. There’s not even a scene set in the Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter White Houses, but they might have been the freshest since those two presidents are largely forgotten. It might have been nice to know how Cecil felt or related to a truly progressive president from his native South (Carter).
What I Would Have Done Differently: Had at least a couple scenes set in the Ford and Carter White Houses. All in all though, an interesting, panoramic view of history that Americans already know well, but seen through fresh eyes.