Lee Daniel's The Butler (2013)

An Oscar bate social conciseness film that failed at getting any Academy Award nominations, but that did succeed at becoming a rather successful sleeper hit this last summer. Lee Daniels The Butler (the full title includes the directors name because of a rather silly copyright dispute regarding use of the intended title The Butler), stars Forest Whitaker as Cecile Gaines, an (obviously) black man who spent decades working at the White House as a butler from the Eisenhower through Reagan Administrations. Oprah Winfrey plays Gaines periodically unfaithful and alcoholic wife Gloria, and British actor David Oyelowo plays Cecile's oldest son Louis, who spends much of his life estranged from his father, heavily involved in the civil rights movement and later a Democratic congressman from Tennessee. Cecile's younger son Charlie (Elijah Kelly) is killed as a solder in Vietnam. The movie is a panoramic journey that tells the story of three decades of American civil rights history as counterpoint and later reconciliation between father and son. Too bad its mostly made up.

Taken only loosely from the reminiscences of actual long time White House butler Eugene Allen, the film is full of historical inaccuracies and out right inventions. I didn't know the extent of these departures from fact until after I saw the film, and I'll tell you now its had a big negative impact on how I came to view the picture. I was expecting/hopping for something along the lines of Backstairs at the Whitehouse, a much more truthful account of two generations of black servants at the White House from the Taft through Eisenhower administrations. Instead I get what I can only call an intentionally misleading leftist political polemic. Gaines did not have the traumatic formative experiences depicted in the film, he had only one child who was never a radical political activist or congressman, and the depictions of the presidents in the film are as suspect as there casting is odd (Robin Williams as Eisenhower?  Allen Rickman as Reagan?). Anyway I was going to give this ***, because it did work as a movie and I enjoyed it when I saw it, but I can't approve of something this inaccurate being presenting as for the most part fact based. So I'm giving no formal rating, and just saying I disprove.