The Butler
2013 · Directed by Lee Daniels
Original language: English
- drama
The story
Cecil Gaines was a sharecropper's son who grew up in the 1920s as a domestic servant for the white family who casually destroyed his. Eventually striking out on his own, Cecil becomes a hotel valet of such efficiency and discreteness in the 1950s that he becomes a butler in the White House itself. There, Cecil would serve numerous US Presidents over the decades as a passive witness of history with the American Civil Rights Movement gaining momentum even as his family has troubles of its own. As his wife, Gloria, struggles with alcoholism and his defiant eldest son, Louis, strives for a just world, Cecil must decide whether he should take action in his own way.
What it’s like
Polished period-drama surfaces throughout: crisp, warm interiors of hotel corridors and the White House, with formal compositions of uniformed staff standing at the edges of frame while presidents sit at the centre. The palette shifts with the decades, from sepia-toned sharecropper fields and muted 1950s pastels to saturated 1960s and 1970s colour, and the camera stays close and intimate with the family kitchens and dinner tables. Sound leans on period soul and Motown, with the score lifting into swells at moments of national upheaval, while the quieter scenes rely on clinking cutlery and murmured conversation. The pacing is episodic, moving decade by decade through presidencies and marches, and its emotional register is earnest and sentimental, with a steady undercurrent of grief and quiet pride. Its central figure is a reserved man slowly finding his voice, and his strained marriage and estranged son give the film its personal weight. Violence is present but not graphic: racist assaults, a shooting and a brief fight are shown with restraint, and there is some drinking and emotional cruelty, with no sexual content. It suits a weekend afternoon with a cup of tea or a shared family viewing, and it is for viewers who want a sweeping history lesson framed through one family's ordinary, dignified life.
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