"The Butler", Lee Daniel's new offering starring Forrest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey (among many others) has its flaws and might be 20 minutes too long. One could quibble with the accuracy (and the unique casting) of the presidents portrayed and the butler himself (based on a real White House butler who served eight of them) but these are minor points.
The power of this film lies in how it portrays and honors the Civil Rights Movement at a time when Americans could use a reminder as to how necessary, heroic and dangerous it was to challenge American apartheid in the South. Most of us remember episodes from it as black and white images from either television or LIFE magazine. To see the Freedom Rides, lunch counter sit-ins and lynchings in true color is a more visceral experience. As is the sheer inhuman hatred of white Southerners whose vicious reaction to their established order being overturned might shock those born after 1960. Their faces contorted in venom could be viewed as an exaggeration. It isn't. The scene of the sit-in volunteers being brutalized at the Woolworth lunch counter is one of the rougher scenes in the movie and based on actual fact. When I was in elementary school, my best friend's father, a Freedom Rider, was beaten half to death by a Klan mob in Alabama.
"The Butler" shows accurately the tension between a new generation of African-Americans defying the system and their parents who were conditioned by decades of oppression to not rock the boat. David Oyelowo, as butler Cecil Gaines's militant son, Louis, deserves the acting kudos he is receiving as do all the major characters of this potent story. Some viewers might shun the glowing references to the election of Barack Obama but this film highlights how black and white Americans have a jarringly different view of our national history. For whites, it is the Land of Free. For blacks, it has been an uphill battle against legally-sanctioned hatred, violence and servitude and as we have seen from Trayvon Martin, the Supreme Court and recent efforts to hamper minority voting rights, the battle is far from over. Those who forget their history are indeed doomed to repeat it.
The power of this film lies in how it portrays and honors the Civil Rights Movement at a time when Americans could use a reminder as to how necessary, heroic and dangerous it was to challenge American apartheid in the South. Most of us remember episodes from it as black and white images from either television or LIFE magazine. To see the Freedom Rides, lunch counter sit-ins and lynchings in true color is a more visceral experience. As is the sheer inhuman hatred of white Southerners whose vicious reaction to their established order being overturned might shock those born after 1960. Their faces contorted in venom could be viewed as an exaggeration. It isn't. The scene of the sit-in volunteers being brutalized at the Woolworth lunch counter is one of the rougher scenes in the movie and based on actual fact. When I was in elementary school, my best friend's father, a Freedom Rider, was beaten half to death by a Klan mob in Alabama.
"The Butler" shows accurately the tension between a new generation of African-Americans defying the system and their parents who were conditioned by decades of oppression to not rock the boat. David Oyelowo, as butler Cecil Gaines's militant son, Louis, deserves the acting kudos he is receiving as do all the major characters of this potent story. Some viewers might shun the glowing references to the election of Barack Obama but this film highlights how black and white Americans have a jarringly different view of our national history. For whites, it is the Land of Free. For blacks, it has been an uphill battle against legally-sanctioned hatred, violence and servitude and as we have seen from Trayvon Martin, the Supreme Court and recent efforts to hamper minority voting rights, the battle is far from over. Those who forget their history are indeed doomed to repeat it.
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