A Most Violent Year

A MOST VIOLENT YEAR       B+         
USA  (125 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  J.C. Chandor 

There is always a path that is most right. 

—Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac)

A throwback to the 70’s, in particular the peculiarly darkened style of THE GODFATHER saga (1972 – 74), though the film takes place in New York City in 1981, a year the city reportedly saw one of the highest crime rates in its history, starring Oscar Isaac from Inside Llewyn Davis (2012) as Abel Morales, owner of a small city oil company.  What’s immediately apparent is the degree that Isaac channels Al Pacino’s performance of Michael Corleone from THE GODFATHER, where he continually tries to be that noble figure not only for his family, but his every move, even while being investigated and heavily scrutinized by the police, is made to garner “respect.”  While his business was inherited through marriage, where his beautiful wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) comes from mob money, Abel spends the entire movie trying to get out from under the shadow of her father’s criminal underworld reputation, trying to prove to anyone who will listen that he runs a legitimate business.  This becomes a running question throughout the film, as Chandor plays close to the vest when doling out plot information, keeping viewers on edge throughout even though it’s filmed in a mesmerizingly slow and hypnotic style.  Stylistically, this low-key film is in a world by itself where nothing else really compares, shot deliberately with a degree of unusually quiet elegance throughout by Selma (2014) cinematographer Bradford Young, making a bold directorial statement simply by charting new territory in a popular genre that has been explored to death.  Rather than accentuate the bloodshed, this film draws us into the strange and curious world of buying property and obtaining a loan, which is an art in itself when you’re trying to accumulate well over a million dollars, mostly from dirty guys that would just as soon rip your head off.  While Abel makes a down payment on a piece of land owned by Hassidic Jews overlooking the waterfront, he comes under intense pressure from all sides when it comes to making the final payment, as if he misses the deadline he could lose it all.  The threatening violence that pervades the mood throughout this film is also met with everyday, ordinary acts of theft, where Abel’s oil trucks are coming under attack, with his drivers are beat up at gunpoint and left on the street while their trucks are hijacked in order to steal every ounce of oil.  This is a dirty business reeking with a history of corruption, where his independent drivers may be challenging the solidarity of the Teamsters union, his competitors may be trying to muscle him out of the way, while Abel’s business practices are being thoroughly investigated by the District Attorney (David Oyelowo, also from Selma) who is bound and determined to uncover wrongdoing in an election year. 

Written by Chandor himself, the film is an existential nightmare where a well-intentioned individual is thwarted at every turn, bearing some similarities to the moral complexities of the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (2009), where like the Old Testament character of Job, a man is challenged at every step of the way but still tries to find a meaningful significance to it all, to be a serious man, someone whose moral values remain intact and where God still has a place in his life.  While the religious context is nonexistent in this movie, replaced by a solidly entrenched, mob-driven capitalistic system that is ripe with corruption, Abel is extremely cognizant of his family’s stature in the New York community, where his every move is driven to elevate their place in society.  While his competitors are thugs that use mafia tactics, what’s intriguing about this story is that these are his friends and relatives, people that he socializes with and attends family gatherings, where cutthroat tactics is all they know.  While Abel tries not to take it personally, he’s not the one that is strong-armed at gunpoint and hauled out of their trucks like his drivers who have literally come under siege.  While common sense suggests they might arm themselves, this is not only illegal and could jeopardize the business, but it also leads to shootouts on public thoroughfares where innocent people are subject to being shot and killed.  Short of hiring armed guards, which the company cannot afford, it’s a tricky situation that plagues not only Abel but his drivers, especially Julian (Elyes Gabel), who very much like Abel is trying to build a life for himself, to make something out of nothing, both of them starting out as drivers, but Julian has the misfortune of being traumatized by the events, especially when he repeatedly gets targeted.  Ever since Steven Soderbergh’s underrated OUT OF SIGHT (1998), comedian Albert Brooks has made the remarkable transition to playing heavies, where he is brilliant underplaying the role of Andrew Walsh, a mafia lawyer, but he’s an essential component in any business transaction, as he’s the keeper of the flame, a company guy trusted by the underworld, the kind of person who has lived to see it all happen before his eyes, where nothing phases him any more, as he knows how things get done.  Andrew is genuinely sympathetic to Abel, as he’s a kid with good instincts, but he may be in over his head. 

Perhaps the real surprise in the film is the performance of Jessica Chastain as Anna, as no nonsense as any man, whose life behind the scenes is rarely even hinted at, but becomes more prominent as the film progresses, where Abel grows increasingly desperate, where his back is against it, yet his calibrated performance remains deliberate and measured throughout.  Anna is a whole other story, where the audience is fortunate to see Chastain in a more menacing role as a gangster’s moll, the femme fatale, a Lady Macbeth, a woman from the streets who knows her way around a crooked business even as her husband strives to be a decent man.  While she’s not easily intimidated, as evidenced by the way she mouths off to the District Attorney when they conduct a search of the home during her young child’s birthday party, seen passing out party favors to each kid at the door as they leave prematurely before reminding the counselor, “This was very disrespectful,” while flicking a cigarette in his face.  As the feds bring multiple indictments against him, Abel has all his money tied up in buying this invaluable piece of land, and when his legitimate lenders dry up, scared away by the feds, he has to make the rounds through the nefarious connections of his own family, hat in hand, asking for last minute loans.  Alessandro Nivola as Abel’s sinister rival Peter Forente is particularly creepy, a guy whose life is so defined by gangland murders that he basically has to spend his entire life behind a protected fortress.  Yet this is a guy he grew up with, who could easily be behind the hijackings, but Abel treats him as a serious man, where otherwise he’d be thrown out on his ear.   The crucial relationship between Chastain and Isaac is superbly developed, continually underplayed, with restrained fireworks and plenty of surprises in store, where this film continually takes unexpected turns in the road, yet never for a minute is anything less than compelling.  Chandor, the driving force behind Robert Redford’s wordless performance in All Is Lost (2013), continues to be a director of intrigue, refusing to follow anyone’s path but his own, growing up in New Jersey, a graduate of The College of Wooster, making starkly different kinds of films than any of his compatriots, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with his first feature MARGIN CALL (2011) following more than a dozen years of making commercials.  In this he resembles Swedish director Roy Andersson, who has directed over 400 commercials, but also Ridley and Tony Scott, Jonathan Glazer, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, not to mention David Fincher.  The music by Alex Ebert is especially effective at the end, America for Me - YouTube (4:08), a dramatic rendition sounding much like Nina Simone.  

Selma

 
Early poster naming Lee Daniels as the director  

 
Amelia Boynton being cared for by an unnamed marcher after being knocked unconscious in a police attack on Selma protesters trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, March 7th  

 
The 2nd attempt to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge is forced to turn around on Tuesday, March 9th  

Martin Luther King and wife Coretta lead marchers across the Alabama River on the first day of the Selma-to-Montgomery march on March 21st  

SELMA           B     
USA  Great Britain  (127 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Ava DuVernay            Official Site

The movement is a rhythm to us
Freedom is like religion to us
Justice is juxtaposition in us
Justice for all just ain't specific enough
One son died, his spirit is revisitin' us
Truant livin' livin' in us, resistance is us
That's why Rosa sat on the bus
That's why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up
When it go down we woman and man up
They say, "Stay down" and we stand up
Shots, we on the ground, the camera panned up
King pointed to the mountain top and we ran up

One day, when the glory comes
It will be ours, it will be ours
Oh, one day, when the war is one
We will be sure, we will be here sure
Oh, glory, glory

[HD] Common & John Legend - Glory (Selma) - GMA ... YouTube (3:12)

One supposes that each generation needs to revisit their relationship with history, especially events recent enough to still be fresh in our minds, where the release of this film comes on the heels of the marches in Ferguson, Missouri, precipitated by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, an unarmed 18-year old black youth shot by a white police officer.  Written by first-time white screenwriter Paul Webb, with considerable uncredited rewrites by the director herself (specifically some of Martin Luther King’s speeches, as the rights had previously been obtained by other film studios), SELMA is a historical drama of events during the Civil Rights movement, African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–68), taking place in the early months of 1965, coming after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination, but the powers to enforce the act remained weak, making it difficult for blacks to register to vote, where the film documents the non-violent methods of civil disobedience implemented by Martin Luther King in the voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama that turned into an all-out assault by the local police, smashing heads with Billy clubs and beating several marchers unconscious, images broadcast across the nation that eventually lead to an outpouring of support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed into law several months later on August 6, 1965.  The film shows how the past is still relevant to the present, and that progress is never guaranteed, especially because the events of the past bear an uncanny resemblance to events of today, particularly the number of young black men being shot and killed by police officers, making this essential viewing.  Just as importantly, on June 25, 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (Oyez: Shelby County v. Holder) essentially struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws overnight without Federal oversight, where incredibly Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that the law was “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”  With Republicans making dire warnings of predicted “voter fraud,” even with no evidence or previous history of fraud, 13 states quickly passed more restrictive voter ID laws, as scores of election laws were suddenly enacted banning same day registration, a common practice in some states, and requiring voter ID’s in a blatant attempt to thin the ranks of poor and minority voters, where according to this November 5, 2014 article, How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make, by Wendy R. Reiser, a former NYU Law School professor, the changes already had a significant impact as recently as the November 2014 elections that ushered in a Republican landslide, where once again millions of disenfranchised voters across the country were legally turned away from polling booths, 600,000 in Texas alone, exactly as they were half a century ago. 

While SELMA is considered a “black” film, largely due to the historical civil rights subject matter, where this is the first fictional film depicting Martin Luther King and is actually that rare Hollywood film directed by a black woman, but only three out of eleven producers backing the film are black, including billionaire television mogul Oprah Winfrey, the director herself, and Paul Garnes, an executive producer from the Tyler Perry Studios.  With one Latina working out of Hollywood, all the rest are white, including Brad Pitt and two other execs from his Plan B Entertainment studios, and four British/Irish producers associated with British film director Danny Boyle.  While this is as racially diverse as Hollywood allows, an industry where black history is almost exclusively projected through an all-white lens, using blacks in front of the camera with whites thoroughly entrenched behind the scenes, much like Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013), although recent low-budget independent films like Fruitvale Station (2013) have attempted to change that perception by showing a day in the life of a young, unarmed black kid eventually shot by police before the night is over, where at the moment it is estimated that police kill a black man, woman, or child every 28 hours.  Nearly half have no weapon on them, or anything resembling a weapon when they are killed, though in more than a third of the cases the police allege the victims displayed a weapon, often disputed by witnesses on the scene, as only 18% (less than one in five) are actually armed.  Blacks are arrested at nearly 3 times the rate of other Americans, while the likelihood of black males going to prison in their lifetime is 28% compared to 4% of white males, and if that black male drops out of high school the number skyrockets to 50%.  While other films like The Central Park Five (2012), In the Land of the Free... (2009), and The Trials of Darryl Hunt (2006) document the lengthy prison terms served by blacks who were wrongfully convicted, according to The National Registry of Exonerations, since 1989 blacks constitute nearly half of all wrongfully convicted cases, where the disparity is greatest in sexual assault cases, as black defendants constitute 25 percent of prisoners incarcerated for rape, but 61 percent of those exonerated for such crimes.  Still, according to a December 31, 2014 article published by the Chicago Reporter, Data: Black Chicagoans at higher risk of being shot by police, Chicago police are 10 times more likely to shoot blacks compared to whites, where the city pays out millions of dollars in damages each year to settle related lawsuits involving police misconduct (specifically $45.5 million from 441 lawsuits between January 2009 and November 2011), most based on excessive force and false arrest allegations, where a third of these cases involve repeat police offenders, with 4 out of 5 of them retaining their jobs, as rarely are members of the police force found culpable. 

With this in mind, SELMA is not a new radical approach in cinema, but seems more instrumental in becoming a teaching moment to reacquaint a new generation of viewers to this recent chapter in Civil Rights history, a timely look back, drawing parallels into our modern world, using the Spielberg model of emotional manipulation in an attempt to hook the most amount of viewers.  Spielberg is a contentious director to cineastes and art film devotees as the measure of his success has largely come in dollars and cents instead of artistic accolades, where he has always ridden the wave of convention instead of carving out new roads.  Spielberg always associated his historical dramas like AMISTAD (1997) and Lincoln (2012) with teaching moments, which included handing out educational materials with the release of his films, much like blockbuster films use merchandising.  Similarly, pamphlets and free educational materials have been made available to the teaching community with the release of this film, where the director Ana DuVernay has indicated the film is a teaching tool that she hopes will trigger curiosity in students, though she cautions that the film condenses 13 years into 120 minutes, where she hopes educators will fill in the history gaps in classrooms nationwide.  The film is not without controversy, however, as President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), after an early career voting against racial equality became a strong proponent who helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but was more interested in advancing his War on Poverty agenda that he introduced in his January 1964 State of the Union address and felt the time was not yet right for Selma or voting rights, believing this could undermine the southern votes needed for passing his own legislation.  While taped conversations between King and Johnson confirm that the President supported King’s cause, many watching the film will assume that Johnson was an obstacle for civil rights leaders, as the film shows Johnson meeting with King ahead of time and is adamantly against his intentions to march in Selma, fearing it could lead to a bloodbath, while also well aware of the divisive racial power of voting rights in the South, that passage of the bill would for all intensive purposes hand the mostly Democratic South over to the Republicans for generations to come (which indeed it has).  The film actually demonizes Johnson, suggesting he attempted to sabotage King’s efforts in Selma by endorsing the dirty tricks of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker) to discredit King and his wife, where the timeline of the movie events are set by FBI agent surveillance reports where King and his supporters are referred to as agitators and black militants. While Johnson certainly had access to these files and no doubt listened to FBI tapes (as do all Presidents), there is no evidence suggesting Johnson directed or controlled the sinister and malicious actions of J. Edgar Hoover and his illegal spy operation known as COINTELPRO.  The FBI campaign to discredit and destroy King was marked by extreme personal vindictiveness, where as early as 1962 Hoover himself penned an FBI memorandum, “King is no good,” claiming he was “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”  Shortly afterwards in 1963, Time magazine chose King as the “Man of the Year,” and later in October 1964 at the age of thirty-five he won the Nobel Peace Prize, at the time the youngest recipient to ever win the award, an honor which elicited Hoover’s comment calling King the “most notorious liar” in the country.

The opening sequence blends together the FBI smear campaign against King, his trip abroad to receive the Nobel Prize, the racially motivated 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of a Birmingham church in September, 1963 killing four young black girls, and the eerily cruel attempt of Selma resident Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) to register to vote when the white registrar makes the outrageous demand that she name all sixty-seven names of the Alabama county judges before he’ll grant her request, stamping “rejected” on her application.  While highlighting the role of King, the film is not a King biopic, but a snapshot of a particular place and time, a moment in history that still resonates today with astonishing power.  David Oyelowo, a classically trained British-Nigerian actor spent seven years campaigning for the role of Martin Luther King, but Lee Daniels, the original director on the film didn’t believe he was right for the part.  Due to the slowness to materialize, most of the original cast and Daniels eventually left the film project, where it was Oyelowo who suggested Ana DuVernay as the director, as they worked together in an earlier film she directed, MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (2012).  What Oyelowo brings to the role is the familiar cadence of King’s speech that the audience immediately recognizes, while another British-Nigerian actress Carmen Ejogo plays Coretta Scott King, where each bring the required level of dignity and reflection to their relationship, which is tested throughout by continued FBI leaks to King’s wife.  By the time King arrives to Selma with religious leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in January, 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a collection of white and black volunteers, mostly college students, had already been leading a voter registration drive since 1961, having received considerable resistance in their efforts from white county law enforcement officials, where in the summer of 1964, three SNCC workers, James E. Chaney of Mississippi, and Michael H. Schwerner and Andrew Goodman of New York, were killed by white supremacists.  While Selma had a population that was 50 percent black, only 1 percent of the town’s black residents were registered as voters.  King proposed the two organizations work together, combining forces against Selma’s racial intransigence, organizing a series of demonstrations in front of the Dallas County Courthouse, bringing national coverage to their efforts, hoping to build momentum from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to win federal protection for voting rights.  On February 17, protestor Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) was fatally shot by an anonymous Alabama state trooper in a full-out night assault against marchers, events that were not captured by television cameras due to the cover of darkness. 

In response, a protest march from Selma to Montgomery was scheduled for Sunday, March 7, where six hundred marchers assembled in Selma, including Rev. Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce) from SCLC and John Lewis (Stephan James), then SNCC chairman, now a prominent U.S. Congressman from Georgia who has been re-elected nine times since 1986, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge (now a U.S. National Historic Landmark) over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery, the state capitol.  On the other side, however, they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police led by Sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston) who ordered them to turn around.  When the protesters refused, to the cheers of white bystanders the officers shot teargas and charged the crowd on horseback, beating the nonviolent protesters over their heads with Billy clubs, including John Lewis who still bears the scars, knocking several unconscious, including one of the organizers, Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint), a longtime friend of both Martin and Coretta King, where a picture of her lying on the Edmund Pettus Bridge was broadcast around the world, ultimately hospitalizing over fifty people, a day now commonly referred to as Bloody Sunday.  Outraged by the events, King called upon supporters to come to Selma for a second march two days later, where he was encouraged by the outpouring of support from clergy and other sympathizers across the nation, but also warned by the Justice Department to wait until the courts could rule on whether the protesters deserved federal protection, as Alabama Governor George Wallace (Tim Roth) refused to intercede.  Still conflicted, King led the second march on March 9, but after kneeling in prayer he turned the marchers back before crossing the bridge, a momentary pause for mutual reflection.  That night, however, a white group beat and murdered civil rights activist James Reeb (Jeremy Strong), a minister from Boston who heeded King’s call to come to Selma for the second march.  King’s actions exacerbated the tension between SCLC and the more militant SNCC, who were pushing for more radical tactics that would move from nonviolent protest to active opposition against racist leaders and institutions, where in the late 60’s SNCC changed their name and eventually became a black nationalist group advocating black power, where an attempt to align themselves with the Black Panther Party failed, with the organization largely disappearing after that in the early 70’s, where only small local chapters remained.  Several weeks afterwards on March 21, however, the historic final march included federal protection, leading to the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 several months later. 

While the weakness of this film is an uneven script that often stumbles into poor melodrama substituting for history, one of the real surprises is how King is not portrayed “only” as the noble hero, like he’s always been depicted in history lessons or Black History month, but as an ordinary man who takes out the garbage and appreciates a lively conversation over a home-cooked meal, while he’s also a great orator with unique abilities to stand up to extraordinary pressure, whose human flaws are exposed alongside an acknowledgment that the movement under his direction made plenty of mistakes, often paying too high a price by underestimating or miscalculating damaging outcomes.  History is never a perfect picture, but DuVernay does do an impressive job revisiting this unique moment in history, making a compelling case for remembering the hard-earned lessons of the past and learning from those mistakes, as otherwise those same problems are likely to reemerge and haunt future generations.  The film quite clearly demonstrates how a nation’s past shapes its current form, where there seems to be a strong urge among many, including Supreme Court Justices, to dismiss any disadvantage minority groups still have today by ushering in phrases like “that was 60 years ago,” but films like this show that national policies made hundreds of years ago still have consequences that are being felt today.  One can’t talk about race, or even poverty or social injustice, without acknowledging how we arrived at this point in time.  It is essential, therefore, that we examine our own unvarnished history without a Hollywood lens.  The LBJ inaccuracies in the film are no worse than Ben Affleck’s intentional distortion of the truth in Argo (2012), dismissing the role of the Canadians and once again creating a fictitious version of Hollywood heroism, yet that film won the Academy Award for Best Picture.  In American Sniper (2014), audiences are clearly willing to whitewash history in the Hollywood style and overlook the racist component of the American soldier in their zealous rush to support our troops and label the film heroic and patriotic, while in SELMA it’s a much harder sell to stare into the face of American racism and see how it impacts upon our lives today.  In attempting to be honest about history, whatever SELMA may be, it’s not the condensed or sanitized version that Argo and American Sniper are, fictitious Hollywood films that feed into a false mythological impression of America.  The disinterest in SELMA at the Cineplex suggests America is not yet interested in reliving the past or in addressing the message of racism while instead preferring movies with a toned down and mostly white Hollywood view.  Yet only by conscientiously acknowledging our past and seeing how it shapes the present do we have any hope of understanding the myriad of complex racial problems that continue to plague us in the present. 

Lee Daniels' The Butler

 

LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER           B-         
USA  (132 mi)  2013  d:  Lee Daniels                 Official site

Darkness cannot drive out darkness — only light can.        —Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is a truly strange movie, at times deliciously entertaining, while at other times one is simply aghast at the ineptitude, where mixed signals are sent throughout, partly tragic, partly comic, where for several moments one had to wonder if this could possibly be a subversive attempt to actually send a message to America, but instead it comes across as a toned-down Disney movie of the week, where the narrative style unfortunately resembles Uncle Remus storytelling at the White House, told in the supposedly inoffensive manner of Disney’s SONG OF THE SOUTH (1946), which is really one long American narrative as Uncle Remus takes us through the Civil Rights era of history, as seen through the eyes of a long-serving White House butler, Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker).  Rather than deal with anything remotely resembling the present, it appears that today’s movies prefer to remain stuck in the past, continually conjuring up stories that deal with an era of loyal black servitude and obedience, like The Help (2011), Django Unchained (2012), 12 Years a Slave (2013), and now yet another, as if the drumbeat of showing past transgressions will somehow alter the course of today’s history.  If that is the desired effect, it’s not working.  One has to wonder who decides which black stories are told, or how they’re told?  And why do we continue to project the same negative stereotypes that only reinforce images of black subservience?  Black talents like Viola Davis and Forest Whitaker have received critical acclaim for playing maids and butlers, while British black actor Chiwetel Ejiofor is the odds on favorite for an Academy Award for playing a kidnapped free slave sold into the brutality of slavery.  Why is Hollywood retelling the same story of black oppression and subjugation?  Because the formula makes money, so it appears the only work blacks can obtain in Hollywood these days is enduring the unending racial abuse inflicted upon them and then somehow it’s considered a victory if they survive.  No one likes to be reminded of the times when they were terrorized and subjugated and forced to live in fear, but black Americans have to relive this experience seemingly forever and then watch people applaud this as art.     

Adapted from an article written by Wil Haygood that appeared in The Washington Post just a few weeks after President-elect Obama won the election on November 27, 2008, A Butler Well Served by This Election - Washington Post, providing a profile of White House butler Eugene Allen and his wife Helene.  While the article placed its focus upon the painfully slow addition of black officials working in various White House administrations, this story is ignored by the movie.  It should also be stated that Allen didn’t have a militant son, or a cotton plantation childhood, as these were Hollywood constructions needed to fabricate an epic storyline like this one, which is a doozy, as it weaves one man’s family through a greatest hits of Civil Rights history, including Brown vs. Board of Education, the freedom riders, the Birmingham boycotts, the Little Rock school crisis, federal intervention sent to integrate southern schools, the Civil Rights legislation, the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X, the cities burning, the Black Panther party, before then reaching across the ocean to Apartheid in South Africa.  That’s quite a mouthful, enough to make one wince at the utter superficiality that each historical event receives.  Making matters worse, the name actors portraying the United States Presidents are caricatures that one presumes are unintentionally comic, where guffaws in the audience are simply based upon casting choices and the physical mannerisms used to play each President, as they resemble Saturday Night Live comic portrayals.  And the casting of Jane Fonda as Nancy  Reagan, how is that not subversive?  She’s exquisite, by the way, in her own hilarious way.

The casting of Whitaker as the butler is a good one, as after all, he already won an Oscar for portraying Idi Amin in THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (2006), and he was Jim Jarmusch’s Zen-like high priest in GHOST DOG (1999), so we know this guy’s capable of just about anything.  Oprah, on the other hand, as his wife Gloria, will always be seen as Oprah, no matter what anybody else says, as she’s too big a celebrity and personality, where all attempts to act are just that, pretending to be something she isn’t, where in the early part of the picture where she plays a drunk, she simply channels Mo’Nique from PRECIOUS (2009), and yes, it’s really that obvious.  They have two sons, where the oldest, Louis, is played by David Oyelowo, who becomes a fierce young militant who literally takes us through every stage of history from the freedom riders to the Black Panthers, all of which he experiences himself, including being in the same motel room as Martin Luther King just before he got shot.  Say what?  How is that possible if he was not part of the inner team, all names that are familiar to us by now?  Well, the truth is, it’s not, but this is a Hollywood recreation of history, and they can do whatever they want so long as they think it will sell tickets.  Which brings us to why is Lee Daniels name in the title?  Screenwriter Danny Strong was hired a year before Daniels signed on as the film’s director, a picture purchased by Harvey Weinstein, so one would suspect that Daniels, the last one hired, had the least amount of control over the picture, even when it comes to naming rights.  The official story is that The Weinstein Company could not get the MPAA’s Title Registration Bureau (TRB) to authorize the use of the title, even under appeal, because of an existing 1916 Warner Brother’s short film by that name, charging Weinstein with willful violation and ordering a $400,000 fine.  As a result, they put the director’s name in front of the title, causing a certain amount of consternation to Daniels, who felt people might think he was drawing too much attention to himself.          

What is particularly powerful about the picture is the portrayal of black father and son relationships, established in the opening shots of the film in 1926 Georgia at an existing cotton plantation where Cecil (as a child) and his own father worked, which was run exactly as it did during the slavery era, no difference whatsoever except they didn’t shackle slaves.  Blacks were still routinely killed by whites, calling them “niggers,” even by judges in court, and whites just as routinely got away with it, using the violent threat of lynchings and the KKK if anyone had any other ideas.  In another casting misadventure, Mariah Carey plays Cecil’s mother in the fields, where after her own sexual assault, they both witness the shooting of her husband, after which Cecil is led from the fields into the house under the tutelage of none other than Vanessa Redgrave to become the subservient “house nigger.”  He learns so well he eventually becomes the White House butler serving 8 different Presidents from Truman to Reagan, where the rules are identical, as he is never to display any emotion, react to anything seen, or engage anyone other than his boss.  The irony here is that his oldest son runs off to college and becomes a campus militant, the polar opposite of his father, where viewing American black history from the 20’s through the 80’s through the shared father and son experiences is simply too much, as it’s too great a cultural divide.  For instance, we learn about what happened to Emmett Till over the dinner table as a drunken Gloria is serving food to her family, where that’s the extent of the experience, mentioned in much the same way as idle gossip.  Both parents are convinced that having left the South, they have obtained security for their family.  But Louis will not rest until blacks have the same rights as other American citizens, joining the freedom riders where he is routinely assaulted, beaten, spit upon, and arrested.  Because of these offenses, Cecil disowns his son and refuses to speak to him, which is his way of deluding himself about his son and history.    

In much the same way, it’s interesting how the Presidents engage in private conversations with their black butlers about the ‘black” problems, where Eisenhower doesn’t get how his experience growing up on a farm isn’t the same as Cecil’s, or LBJ’s profusive use of the word “nigger” to his own cabinet and staff somehow evolves to the word “Negro” on national television, JFK coolly describes to Cecil (who had no idea) that his son has been arrested 15 times, before television photos of the firehoses turned on peacefully demonstrating blacks in Birmingham cause he and his brother to have a change of heart on the race issue, while Reagan (played by the Harry Potter wizard specializing in the Dark Arts) second guesses his own shortsightedness on the post Civil Rights race relations, something one sincerely doubts, since the Reagan Republicans have consistently attempted to all but legalize racial discrimination, playing the race card in political ads ever since that cynically appeal to white votes.  But in this film, the theme of the film comes from the prophetic words of Martin Luther King, Jr. spoken to Louis just moments before he would be shot, “Domestics play a very big role in our history.  In many ways they are subversive without ever knowing it,” suggesting they break down negative racial stereotypes by demonstrating steady employment, also by performing their jobs with grace and dignity, showing that they can be trusted, all of which defies the inherently distrustful views of racial bigotry. 

But the arc of the story leads to a reunification of father and son, to President Obama, and the mistaken belief that things are finally so much better for blacks in America, where the film’s tagline, “One quiet voice can ignite a revolution,” is simply ridiculous.  Who are they kidding?  Then why are so many black men (over a million) languishing in prisons at the moment?  And why is it legal to arrest a black and a white man for the exact same drug offense, yet the sentence for the black is so much more severe than the white, who with a lawyer may never serve any prison time at all?  Whites use drugs 5 times more than blacks, yet blacks are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites.  Blacks constitute more than 80% of those incarcerated under federal crack cocaine laws and serve substantially more time in prison than do their white counterparts, despite that fact that more than 2/3 of crack cocaine users in the U.S. are white or Hispanic, so it’s now perfectly legal for the police to exclusively target black neighborhoods for drug raids and for the court system to exhibit racial discrimination in court sentencing, and no one says a word.  But while blacks no longer have to sit at the back of the bus, progress has been slow going, with all too many reminders of the vicious cycle of racial hatred that continues without end from generation to generation.         

While the picture has some well known blacks promoting and participating in the making of the movie, the question must be asked, is this a black movie?  Borrowing from the website Racism Is White Supremacy:  Is “Lee Daniels' The Butler” (Really) A “Black Movie?” | Racism Is ... 

1. Who wrote the screenplay for the movie, The Butler? 

 
Danny Strong, Screenwriter for ‘The Butler,’ who was hired to write “The Butler” in 2009, a year before Daniels even signed on as director.

2. Who Owns the (Distribution) Rights to  the movie, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”?

Harvey Weinstein (Co-Chairman – the Weinstein Company)

 

David Glasser, Weinstein Co. COO

3. Who are the Producers, Executive Producers and Co-Producers of “The Butler?”

Laura Ziskin – Executive Producer (deceased)

Hilary Shor – Executive Producer 

Adam Merims – Executive Producer

Buddy Patrick – Producer

Shelia Johnson – Producer

Lee Daniels – Producer

Cassian Elwes – Producer 

How, then, is this considered a “black” movie?  This is Hollywood’s portrayal of a black movie, which is an altogether different thing, as the creative minds and financial power behind the film are almost entirely white.  So one must keep in mind that this is still how white people view blacks even in contemporary society, where it’s a continuation of a white Hollywood racist fantasia that’s been the corporate business model for well over 100 years, where leading black roles of continued submission and obedient servitude to whites are the ones more likely to be accepted by white audiences and nominated for Academy Awards.