Deborah Ross

The Butler, about a black domestic in the White House, is too painfully obvious

The movie is full of cliches and has a sentimental ending you could see coming all the way from Australia

The Butler tells the story of an African–American butler at the White House who served eight American presidents over three decades and it plays as a ‘greatest hits’ of the civil rights movement, along with whatever else they decided to throw in, like Vietnam, apartheid, and Lyndon B. Johnson on the can. (Actually, Lyndon B. Johnson on the can was rather the highlight.) It is heavy-handed, predictable, bland and so contrived in its sentimentality I sniggered at what should have been the moments of emotional impact. However, all was not lost, as I did have a nice little doze, which, as it was a morning screening, set me up quite nicely for the rest of the day. So there was that, but only that, alas.

Directed by Lee Daniels (Precious) in full-on melodramatic style, along with a few other styles, simply as and when — don’t know; you tell me — it stars Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, a fictional character loosely based on Eugene Allen, who worked for the White House for 34 years before retiring as head butler in 1986. The story opens in Georgia, during Cecil’s boyhood, with two slave bodies swinging from a tree, lynched. Next, it is Cecil in the cotton fields, his mother (Mariah Carey, can you believe) being dragged off and raped by the white master, his father stepping up to protest, and the white master shooting him in the head.

Slavery in America was grotesque, and remains a stain upon that nation in the same way any concentration camp remains a stain upon a nation, but I am sorry to say — and I truly am, actually — that, cinematically, when all this unfolded within the first few minutes I thought: ‘Oh, that’s what this film is.

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