The Butler

The Butler, propelled by the dazzling performances of Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey, is a rich, engaging, insightful, nuanced, complex and evocative film that eventually disappoints as it resolves its dramatic and personal tension in a surrender to simplistic, stereotypical political ideology. It is based, loosely, on the story of a real butler who served eight US presidents. The primal intuition of the film is the sterling character and integrity of this butler and the miraculous manner in which he transcends and transforms his subservient position by his quiet dignity, humility, industry, and loyalty. Additionally, he is a faithful and devoted husband and father. The dramatic action springs from his relationship with his son who is coming of age in the 1960s as a militant civil rights activist and is ashamed of his father’s submissive profession. The film poignantly portrays the excruciating break that occurred between fathers (the WWII generation) and their sons (the “boomers”) in that distressing period. The film brilliantly balances the protagonist and antagonist as the viewer respects and sympathizes with both positions: the butler is flawlessly admirable and charming even as the young man is surely justified in his rage at the system. Throughout the film, both sides of the argument are held in a delicate, provocative tension. In a key interchange, the son shows that he is ashamed about his father’s work and he is corrected by his mentor, a civil rights leader, who says that domestic servants are actually subversive rather than subservient in that they undermine the stereotype by their work ethic, loyalty, and moral integrity. This, I take, to be the key to the movie. A secondary plot is his relationship with his wife, played superlatively by Oprah, who is drifting into boredom, resentment, alcoholism and adultery until her unexpected and inexplicable awakening to sobriety and to the value of her extraordinary husband. It is only at the very end of the movie that we see the couple preparing for Church and sharing the Bible but her change of heart is unintelligible without something like a 12-step engagement or an evangelical conversion. The portrayal of the presidents is remarkable in that there were zero attempts at physical similarity. They are humanized, even as their residual racism is highlighted. And the Republicans, although on the “wrong side” of civil rights, are presented nicely: Reagan is shown in gestures of anonymous generosity and Nixon is surely smiling (from purgatory, I imagine) as he is so much more handsome, charming and “cool” than the movie’s JFK. (So much for historical accuracy!) Most of the movie is entirely fictional. For example, the historical butler had one, not two sons, and he was not a militant activist. More troubling, however, was the fabricated beginning of the film in which the protagonist, as a young boy, witnesses the rape of his mother by a white psychopath, the murder of his father, and the passivity of many plantation workers who stand by and watch the atrocity. The incident was overdone, melodramatic and offensive. But the conflict between the angry activism of the son and the deferential humility of the father captured the anguish of that time and deeper spiritual issues involving injustice, anger and submission. This is, however, where the film finally disappoints. The butler comes around, eventually, to embrace the civil rights movement as he joins his son in picketing against apartheid in South Africa and then weeps with elation at the election of Obama. The plot line is, then simple…it is one I myself learned very clearly in a Catholic high school around 1964: racism, as in the South, is bad; civil rights are good. However, the moral values, the nuance, the complexity on the personal level that was so brilliantly portrayed by the actors is waved away in political simplicity and stereotype. I would suggest that the moral values so passionately enacted by the butler are precisely those that have been disparaged, on the political or public level, by the civil rights movement and political liberalism in general in the years since King’s death. The butler was: humble, hard-working, responsible, chaste, faithful to his wife, loyal to his employers, self-reliant, respectful of authority, patient, manly, paternal and religious. By contrast, the civil rights movement went on to prostitute itself by adultery with a political liberalism defined by: abortion rights, sexual permissiveness, rejection of parental rights (vouchers, credits) in education, a culture of entitlement, and an ethos of “victimhood.” The film ends on the note of Obama-adoration without the slightest clue that the butler, as portrayed here, might not weep with elation at the consequences of political liberalism: serial abortions, single mothers stuck in poverty, the break-up of the family.