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We saw "The Butler" in Brevard with a lot of other old people and we were all, I'm sure, processing our own history in parallel with the chronology of the film.
I usually find these kind of historically inspired fictions melodramatic and it was, but there was no way not to be deeply moved by that panorama of civil rights history. When the movie ended with Obama's victory in 2008, I felt a great continuity into our current and ongoing struggle for voting rights and gay rights.
It was not a documentary, folks, just a way to tell some historical truth in a story; the father-son relationship was a convenient way to compress a lot of years into a coherent chronology. Some critics don't get that, and some right-wing racists hate having the story told at all. But it's out there and actually making money, and totally worth the price of admission to see Jane Fonda's cameo as Nancy Reagan. "Whatever the future holds for "Lee Daniels' The Butler", one groundbreaking fact remains: Somehow, someway, a commercial feature film about the civil rights era was made by a black director with a predominantly black cast without a major white character being the focus of the narrative." -- Gene Seymour on CNN |
