Forest Whitaker
Cecil Gaines
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Aug 16, 2013 · Rent Lee Daniels' The Butler on Prime Video, or buy it on Prime Video. Gut-wrenching and emotionally affecting, Lee Daniels' The Butler overcomes an uneven narrative thanks to strong...
- (3.1K)
- Lee Daniels
- PG-13
- Forest Whitaker
A look at the life of Cecil Gaines who served eight presidents as the White House's head butler from 1952 to 1986, and had a unique front-row seat as political and racial history was made.
Forest Whitaker. This article is more than 10 years old. The Butler trailer: Oprah Winfrey in the White House. Winfrey cast as the wife of the butler (played by Forest Whitaker) who attended...
Aug 15, 2013 · ‘The Butler’ examines civil rights history from a new perspective - The Boston Globe. MOVIE REVIEW. ‘The Butler’ examines civil rights history from a new perspective. By Ty Burr Globe...
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The Butler fictionalises Eugene Allen as Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), and relocates his 1920s plantation childhood from Virginia to Georgia. When the white plantation owner rapes his mother (Mariah Carey), his father doesn't react. "It's his world," his father says, indicating the white man. "We're just living in it." The line "It's X's world, w...
Allen began his service as a pantry worker in 1952 during Truman's second term. In the film, Gaines takes up the butler role in 1957, during Dwight D Eisenhower's second term. Eisenhower sent troopsto Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect black students enrolled in a newly integrated high school. The film gets it right that Allen attended this meeting,...
Worse yet, John Cusack turns up as Ike's vice-president, Richard Nixon. Both his extra-long, told-a-lie fake nose and his Saturday Night Live Nixon impression are more comic than the rest of the film is built to take. Cusack skulks around, swearing, sweating and bullying butlers, toxic slime dripping from his fangs. It gets even sillier in 1974, wh...
Throughout, the film juxtaposes Gaines's invisible, servile life in the White House with the political adventures of his elder son Louis (David Oyelowo). Louis follows Martin Luther King, then Malcolm X, then the Black Panthers. Gaines's younger son Charlie (Elijah Kelley) fights in Vietnam. If you're wondering whether it might have been a big deal...
We zip past presidents Ford and Carter (who remembers those guys anyway?) and land with a thunk in the era of Ronald Reagan. Alan Rickman, taking on the role, looks great, but the Sheriff of Nottingham and Professor Snape punch their way through his accent. It's distressingly reminiscent of Sean Connery's hopeless stab at Chicago Irish in The Untou...
The Butler has upset a few Reagan historians, who think it implies the president had some not very warm feelings about black people. It shows him threatening to veto Congressional sanctions on apartheid South Africa. This is accurate, but Reagan's diaries show he did so because he disliked sanctions as a policy, arguing they hurt ordinary people – ...
An earnest but unwieldy take on 20th-century African American history, which wobbles between deeply affecting and farcical. There's too much going on, and the dizzying clutter of stars and presidents obscures its better moments.
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Aug 5, 2013 · John F Kennedy. Richard Nixon. US politics. Oscars 2014. Oprah Winfrey. Forest Whitaker. This awards season, one political heavyweight is The Butler, Lee Daniels' tale of a real-life butler...
