Review: LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER

While I adored the story it was recounting, and the incredibly able, expertly assembled cast of black actors in its support, LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER left me cold.  And I was disappointed that it did so.  Least of all concerns, the shameless stunt casting of almost all the presidential cameos was underwhelming, as I predicted early on after seeing its trailer.  But, most vexingly, the film as a whole was generally, and genially, silly on the screenplay and directorial levels.  It talks down to its audience, no matter its makeup, and assumes it knows nothing, and I found that hard to take (actually, I found this insulting).  Regardless of subject matter, THE BUTLER is another of those many extra-respectful bio-pics that sets out to cover too much history, and too much of its lead Cecil Gaines' life (the character is based on real-life White House butler Eugene Allen, and I have to ask: why didn't they use the man's real name?)  And so, as it trundles dutifully through eight decades of black strife and achievement, THE BUTLER tiredly plays like "America's Most Horrible Hits" as do so many forgotten Hollywood bio-pics.  Out of a generous 135 minute running time (and a better movie could have supported even more time), fully 15 minutes of the film is taken up with "televised" versions of all those incredibly important but widely-seen film clips some of us have viewed about a hundred times before in documentaries and narrative films dealing with the 1960s and 70s (there are lots of shots of people watching TV in THE BUTLER, and this is never a good thing; what's less interesting than watching people watching TV?).  Even if you make allowances for younger audiences (and are we all really now being asked to sit through movies that are dumbed down for those audience members who really have no value of history), I ask you, once you've seen it: Imagine what THE BUTLER would have been like if it had simply taken place between the years 1963-1971 (with a epilogue set in Obama's 2008).  Can you possibly see where that would have resulted in a more focused and exacting film? 

Visually, Andrew Dunn's colorful cinematography for THE BUTLER impresses (unusually so for a 2013-era period piece--red, yellow and blue actually appear in full here, and the film does not read overwhelmingly sepia as many present-day period movies do).  Ruth Carter's vibrant costuming is also deeply impactful throughout, most particularly when leads Forrest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey joyfully appear in matching black-and-white disco suits in their initial 1970s scene together, though they don't get much time to revel happily while so bedecked.  But it's Danny Strong's screenplay that takes things down here: it ladles on massively distracting cliches, especially in its unneeded narration (there are plenty of scenes that would've worked on image and performance alone, but the overly-obvious voiceovers make your discomfited eyes roll back in your head).  Lee Daniels' direction stays on a gracious level (too gracious, actually--surprisingly so for this director of the more daring PRECIOUS and THE PAPERBOY) but Daniels' efforts build up to spectacular fashion in one single, jarring scene that searingly intercuts between three locales: a diner sit-in (with black protesters defying a whites-only seating law), a usually regal VIP serving at the White House, AND the brutal, name-calling preparation black protesters subject themselves to in preparation for an onslaught of white insults.  This sequence is remarkable in its imagination and structure. I am left only to wonder what the whole movie would have been if it had risen up, in entirity, to match this memorable highpoint. 

I also love some of the party scenes at the butler Cecil Gaines' home.  Though the writing in these scenes is sometimes too self-aware, it gives a large portion of the black cast (including Terrence Howard, Lenny Kravitz, Pernell Walker, and Dana Gorrier) a rare opportunity to play off each other, with lively results (this is the best I've seen Cuba Gooding Jr. perform in a good while; he really impressed me here with his energy and humor, and it reminded me why he won his Oscar in the mid-90s).  I loved Forrest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey as the film's leads--Whitaker is impossible to dislike, in any movie--but I did get antsy at the fact that Winfrey's character is confined mostly to the claustrophobic Gaines household for the film's entirety. She's only seen outside the house in two key moments, and the final one--the one we expect early on will be the big payoff--is instead a massive dramatic letdown.  Still, they're both quite fine in the film, and the chief reasons to see it (and, though she's actually the female lead in the movie, Winfrey is assured a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, especially for her shining final scene). 

Oh, and those presidents...ugh.  John Cusack, with his sweaty face and pointy fake nose, fares a little better than I would have expected while playing Nixon, but I still saw SAY ANYTHING's Lloyd Dobler in front of me, and found myself not understanding why it's so difficult for moviemakers (including Oliver Stone) to cast an actor who actually resembles the incredibly unique-looking Nixon for that role. Alan Rickman does recall Ronald Reagan with all that caked-on makeup, but he's doing a sleepy Southern/British accent as "Dutch." and it just totally does not work (though I would add that his portrayal, as a politician who acts differently one-on-one than he does when expected to tow party lines, is historically accurate). The rest of the actors--James Marsden as JFK, Liev Schreiber as LBJ and Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan, among the best of them--are correctly cast for their roles, but they barely register as characters, as they are seen so briefly.  Still, I get that the movie isn't about the presidents, and that's fine...but why cast huge stars in the roles?  Why couldn't have the excellent Anthony Edwards played Dwight Eisenhower?  How about the jowly Dan Hedaya as Richard Nixon (yeah, he played him in DICK, but why should that be a negative)?  Given the long running time, I was thankful, somehow, that Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were left out of the mix, though I had to wonder if a scene with Carter might have been the most interesting one in the movie (could I posit a wig-wearing Ron Howard as Carter?) And why does Vanessa Redgrave need to be in there for a 90-second role, when absolutely no one goes to see a movie nowadays because Vanessa Redgrave is in it?   Ahhh, it's all so confusing, and I dislike that I even have to ask these questions, or attempt to "fix" the movie, and maybe I'm being a too-picky blogger now.  But if THE BUTLER were made with more steadfast integrity, all this conjecture would be unnecessary...

Furthermore, and most negatively, I have to add--having Cecil Gaines' son (David Oyelowo) carry the transparently Forrest Gump-y aspects of the movie--as a man who was always there at the right time to be a witness to history--was a poor decision (though Oyelowo, a fine actor, does his best to sell it).  It's ridiculous that his character--in this film that's "based on a true story"--finds his way into the Memphis hotel room outside of which MLK was shot, while later becoming a high-ranking Black Panther (with an afro-ed Angela Davis stand-in, presumably, as girlfriend, which denigrates HER standing as a black hero), and even later being a top protester against South Africa's apartheid, and later still winning U.S. senatorial standing, all while being the trailblazing lead character's son (without that aspect of the son's past ever being something that ANY of his cohorts talk about specifically, though it is bandied that house help for white people has played "an important role in our people's history").  All of this is astoundingly reductive, as if all black people had everything to do with what all black people were doing (historically, absolutely no one in MLK's circle had anything to do with the Black Panthers, and absolutely no former Black Panther has made their way anywhere near the Senate).  And I have to ask this...how was this politically radical son, as an inevitably closely watched person, able to make way into the White House kitchen to late at night to confront his father in one key 1960s scene?  Now, I realize, it seems that I am babbling on about the film's shortcomings, and maybe it seems that I'm picking on it.  But that is just something that THE BUTLER forces you to do, as much as you want to love it.  And I wanted to love it.  Eugene Allen was a lion, and his story is a valuable one.  But, the way it's told here, THE BUTLER is all just too much to swallow, and I kept wishing that the filmmakers had stuck more lovingly and closely to the actual narrative of Eugene Allen's life (though, I should add, Daniels and company did get some details of Allen's amazing career correct, including his accurately-portrayed aid to Jackie Kennedy after JFK's assassination).  Still...I mean, really...why the heck couldn't the filmmakers have just recounted Allen's ACTUAL story (and using his real name, and telling the true history of his family, or even--God forbid--leaving that soapy element by the wayside?)

I wouldn't argue that LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER is a movie not worth seeing--it's important, yes, for black history, and certainly for those black and white people who don't know such history, and that largely means members of those groups born after 1990, whom I gather (from personal experience) don't realize any history existed before the advent of the Internet.  But I will say that Daniels' movie simply and sadly registers for me--a movie lover, first and foremost, and a history maven second--as an opportunity squandered.  With over three years of prep time, and with a story that was massively worth such effort, THE BUTLER could have been a seriously great film.   Now, as it arrives, it's merely a well-intentioned one.

I finally have to add: where are the black-directed bio-pics of Oscar Micheaux, W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglass, Miles Davis, Louis Armstong, Harriet Tubman, Angela Davis, James Brown, Shirley Chisolm, George Washington Carver, Richard Pryor and about a thousand more black heroes whose stories need to be told (and whose stories exist largely outside of the time many of us have lived through, and whose stories largely do not require the participation of many white characters)?  I know that it's hard to get these movies made in white-controlled Hollywood.  But it's absolutely time for this to change.  This is the lesson of THE BUTLER: If the goal is to educate, and educate us all, then let's get goddamn down to educating, and artfully so, too!

BTW, this is a link to my reaction to Sasha Stone's unqualified positive take on the film on AWARDS DAILY.  

Film #89: Max

In this interview, conducted by the excellent Dark City Dame at Noirish City (where she's kindly invited me to discuss my thirty favorite movies of the 2000s all throughout the month of November 2008), we talk about the incredible film Max.

Dean: Hi, Dame!!

DarkCityDame: Hello! Dean, I’m glad that you’re able to join me for day 3 of our look at your countdown to number one of your 30 best films of the 2000s.

Dean: Sure. It's our little project together!

DarkCityDame: Okay! What is the name of the #28 film we're discussing today?

Dean: Well, it came out in 2002 and it's called Max. It was made by Menno Meyjes, who was the writer of the scripts for Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and Empire of the Sun, two pretty good Spielberg movies from the 1980s. It's an incredible work and even though its subject matter sounds pretty downbeat, it's actually quite entertaining. John Cusack stars in it as Max Rothman, a German/Jewish WWI veteran living with his large family in Germany after the war. It's the 1930s and, having been an artist before he lost an arm in the service, he's now trading in modern art to the rich and powerful in Berlin. And during this time, he befriends a young starving artist named Adolf Hitler, played by Noah Taylor (best known for his role as the young David Helfgott in the 1996 film Shine). And it's this tenuous friendship that's at the center of the film. Cusack is great in it; it's his single best performance (though I love him in The Grifters and Say Anything). But he's warm, generous, funny, intelligent, tasteful and at the same time distasteful in this movie. And he gets to deliver a line I bet you never thought you’d hear in any movie: "Hitler, come on--I'll buy you a lemonade!" Noah Taylor, meanwhile, delivers one of most powerful supporting performances I’ve seen recently. His Hitler is jittery, deparate, nerdy, discomforted, lazy and driven to megolomania. He’s superb.

DarkCityDame: So, does Max center around Hitler as a young struggling artist? Or does it deal with his effort to gain power? While reading an article about the film on the blog site Blunt Review, Emily Blunt wonders if Hitler were a successful artist, would he have walked a different path?

Dean: Well, it follows Hitler, still a corporal in the German army, as he battles, really, two different urges: the urge to keep up with the changing times in the art world, and the urge to be a propagandist for the more radical, anti-Semitic arm of the Army he'd already given so much of his life to. One of the great things about Max is that it humanizes Hitler so that we can see what led him down the dark road that he eventually took. For this reason, the Jewish community blasted the movie before they saw it back in 2002. However, once they did see it, they were convinced it was a deeply moral film that wasn't necessarily sympathetic to Hitler, but does recognize that, despite his monsterous acts, he was in fact one of us. John Cusack, also a producer on the film, said it best: “By understanding somebody who is evil on human terms, you can understand evil a little bit more and how it happens, and prevent it from happening again. It's the exact opposite of exploiting mass murder and the Holocaust. Hitler was such a coward and a liar and repressed sexually, and all those things. He really wanted to be an artist but he didn't have the capacity to be honest with himself."

DarkCityDame: What do you think he meant when he said, "He really wanted to be an artist, but he didn't have the capacity to be honest with himself.”

Dean: In the movie, Max Rothman keeps trying to get Hitler to reveal more of his innermost fears and desires on the canvas—as any real artist should do in their work. But Hitler is just too screwed up inside to do it. He's completely repressed on all fronts--mostly due to his extreme anger at the lowliness of his economic position. But he's also obsessed with traditional German ideals of what constitutes great art--that means paintings of battles, mountainsides, animals, and other “traditionally” beautiful objects. However, in the time period in which Max is set, this is all extremely dated stuff--what Max calls "kitsch,” which basically means corny. Ironically, Max is ultimately most intrigued by Hitler's drawings of his ideal Germany--the Germany that became controlled by the Nazis, and ultimately resulted in Max's death. It's in these art pieces that Max sees Hitler's true creative potential. And, if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that Hitler's designs--the structures, roads, uniforms and symbols of the Nazi party--ARE some of the 20th Century's most enduring artworks. We all like movies dealing with Nazis because the Nazis wore great Hitler-designed uniforms. The only problem is, of course, is that they still represent the onward march of abject horror and unwarrented hate.

DarkCityDame: After seeing Max, what do you think, Dean? Would Hitler have walked a different path if he had been successful as an artist? Or was Hitler just "plain evil?” Could anything have changed his horrid destiny?

Dean: It's hard to say. But I think it's entirely possible he would have been an acceptable man, or at least not a powerful one, had he sold a painting or two. His hatred of the Jews came from his jealousy of their deserved success in business, education, and family. Had he had a taste of achievement as a painter, I think he would have never even considered a career in politics and, of course, the world now would be a different place. One of the amazing qualities of the film is how it illustrates this so cleverly. It's the decade's greatest "What If?" movie. It totally fascinates us with the idea that, had this one little man found something to hold on to besides hate, there would have been so much misery and bloodshed averted. As you watch the movie as see, for instance, the gatherings at the art gallery Max owns, or the parties that his wealthy family throws, it's interesting to think that all the people in attendence would eventually probably be victims of this unknown artist!

DarkCityDame: Wow! That is unbelieveable!

Dean: Yeah, it's an amazingly creative movie that just had to be made. I want to point out here that the film is just as much about the intriguing, fictional character of Max Rothman as it is about Hitler. The scenes examing Max's work ethics and his masterly family life are just as riveting as anything in the film. Meyje's really get us on this man's page and convinces us to love him, with his obvious passions for modernity ("Newness really does it for me, Hitler," he says, smoking one of his many cigarettes--which if one thinks about it, is the only choice Max can make about his one-armed life on his own; smoking, drinking and thinking are the only things he can do without asking for someone's help). This is unquestionably Cusack's finest foray into film--his most complete character.

DarkCityDame: Dean, I wonder why I’ve only now just heard about this film?

Dean: Yeah, it’s very surprising that Max didn't get more notice in 2002. Not one single Oscar nomination, even though it was released in December. I think people had it out for the movie without even catching it. If they had seen it, it would have garnered a Best Actor, Supporting Actor and Screenplay nomination easily. But people largely avoided it because, again, it humanized Adolf Hitler. Then we have to recognize it’s an indie film, so maybe a lot of people just don’t know that it exists. I also think, among the ones who were aware of it, most didn't know what it was about. If it had been called Max and Adolf, then it might have made more of a splash. But then it would've sounded like a buddy movie, which in fact, it is, in a bizarre way.

DarkCityDame: Oh!

Dean: Another "what if.."!

DarkCityDame: Dean, is that it?

Dean: I think so. A good ending there.