Lee Daniels’ The Butler: I Was a Spectator at My Life’s Story

 

I am up in years.  I can’t deny that, but the recent release of Lee Daniels’ The Butler really makes that fact take on a bold headline.

No, unlike the subject of the movie, Cecil Gaines, I wasn’t born on a cotton plantation.  I didn’t stand out in the hot sun and watch while the plantation owner grabbed my mother right in front of my father and me to take her off into the bushes to rape her.  And unlike young Cecil, I didn’t watch while that same son-of-a-bitch took out a pistol and shot my father in the head for trying to speak up like a man because his young son said “Aren’t you going to do anything, Dad?” And I didn’t watch my biracial mother lose her mind as a result, leaving me essentially parentless.

But sooner or later, the Gaines family and my own became players in a period of history that will forever be regarded with both horror and pride.  Cecil and I made our ways to adulthood on different paths, but we both made it.  Unscathed we were not.

This ambitious movie lays out the sociology and the political timeline of The Civil Rights Movement by following an uneducated man who was thoroughly educated in the ways to elegantly serve white people.  As we all know, he ended as a butler in the White House and stayed there through the Reagan Administration.

I will say this very simply:  Daniels nailed it.  How he assembled the budget to hire some of Hollywood’s most high-profile and gifted actors is a mystery to me.  Maybe he leveraged his phenomenal success with Precious (2009).  That movie won the American Film Institute’s Best Picture Award for 2009, and it garnered an Oscar win for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Mo’Nique.  A second Oscar for Best Writing sits somewhere in the home of the film’s screenplay author.

The acting in The Butler is top notch.  Even Robin Williams in the unlikely role of President Dwight D. Eisenhower is quite convincing, thanks in no small way to the excellent job done on all the characters by the makeup department.  If you see it, pay attention to the small tweaks in the actors’ features, like the noses.

This film has Oscar written all over it.  I predict an Oscar for the incomparable Forest Whitaker for his poignant portrayal of butler Cecil Gaines, at least a nomination for Oprah Winfrey as his wife, and probably a Best Picture nod.

This guy couldn’t disagree with me more, although I doubt he’s even seen the movie:

Actor Harry Lennix

Actor Harry Lennix, 48, says the movie is “historical porn.” He accused Lee Daniels of “niggerfying” the beginnings and subsequent life of the fictionalized Gaines.  The film includes an introductory “Based on a True Story” in the opening credits, but I have seen media coverage that claims the story is based on real-life Eugene Allen, who served in the White House from the Truman through the Reagan administrations. 

Eugene Allen with Actor Forest Whitaker in the background

In a speech Lennix made at the Comic-Con International 2013 at San Diego Convention Center on July 20, 2013, Lennix made the following remarks:

“I read five pages of this thing and could not go any further. I tried to read more of it, and I’m not a soft spoken guy, but it was such an appalling mis-direction of history in terms of taking an actual guy who worked at the White House,” said Lennix in a July interview with Shadow and Act. But then he “ni**erfies” it. He “ni**ers” it up and he gives people these, stupid, luddite, antediluvian ideas about black people and their roles in the historical span in the White House and it becomes… well… historical porn. I refused.”

Shades of the outcry that accompanied The Help from numerous black contemporaries who think such pictures are meant to demean the actors and actresses by putting them in these kinds of roles.  In spite of the fact that actress Olivia Spencer, who played a sassy, back-talking maid in The Help, won an Oscar for her work and has gone on record as saying she doesn’t agree with the negative critics, there are still those who resent these films.

People like Harry Lennix were either not around or too young to witness the horrific injustices that were perpetrated daily on Southern (and Northern to a certain degree) black people in the run-up to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. To many of them, it is something they’ve learned about in school while their parents, which includes me, were busy trying to put all that in the distant past by striving to achieve that elusive American Dream they finally thought possible.  It was not the topic of conversation at the dinner table in upwardly-mobile black families. 

It is for that very reason that I disagree with the Harry Lennixes of the world.  It was demeaning, disgusting, degrading and dehumanizing, the way we were treated, but it happened.  Younger black American’s are starting to forget or never really knew the history of their people, the struggle they endured.  That can’t happen.

It cannot happen because, unless every citizen of this country understands what happened in the past, they will never be able to recognize the signs of the American culture slipping back into Jim Crow…or worse.  Those of us with a lot of age on us don’t have that problem; we know the slippage is already happening.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is a two hour and twelve minute experience of life as a black man in the last 50 or 60 years.  It illustrates vividly the generation gap in black families that I witnessed, experienced and felt.  So much happened during those 5 or 6 decades to drive a much-bigger-than-usual wedge between the ideologies of black parents and their children, it was inevitable that children would feel shame about their parents’ subservient jobs – the very jobs that allowed them to even think about equality – and that the parents would simply not understand our willingness to put ourselves in harm’s way for the sake of The Movement.  

We are currently experiencing a similar generation gap in the black community.  Those of us who fought during the 60s have in many cases raised children who enjoyed the fruits of our efforts and have become somewhat dismissive of the past.  Lee Daniels’ The Butler will help bridge that gap.