The Butler

Oprah Winfrey rarely attaches her well known name to a feature film. But this Oscar bait film about an African American butler employed in the White House was to tempting to refuse. With a cast studded with names like Forrest Wittaker, Cuba Gooding Jr., Terrance Howard, John Cusack, Robin Williams, Leiv Schreiber, and Jane Fonda and the already Oscar buzz I couldn't refuse it either...

                                  

Cecil Gains knows how to serve. As a black man in the early 1900s he isn't given a lot of choice about it but he is good at it and he likes it. Cecil knows as a black man in a white man’s world he should be silent unless spoken to, secretive about his politics, and completely compliant with whatever is asked of him. His good service is recognized by a white house executive while visiting a swank restaurant and Cecil is given the chance of a lifetime: to be a butler at the white house. Cecil of course excepts and is privy to presidents meetings and conversations during some of history’s most memorable civil rights moments including Federal integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Nashville sit-ins, the Freedom Riders, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Black Panther Party, the Vietnam War, the Nixon Resignation, the Free South Africa Movement, and Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

I can't refuse a true story, or an Oscar bait movie, or a good cast, or a period piece...  The Butler has all of the above. I enjoyed the story of Cecil Gains very much and would quickly watch it again. Unfortunately at the end of the movie history is muddled in the racial politics of Barack Obama's presidential election and the story of an incredible man reads like a campaign message. The Butler is a movie I couldn't refuse, the politics I can.