“
Lee Daniels’ The Butler” is nothing if not full of sincerity and effort. Which is why it’s so entirely confusing why they cast former teen heartthrob
John Cusack as hangdog
Richard Nixon. He’s fallen from his “
Say Anything” days (and even the highs of “
High Fidelity”), but this is maybe
the worst casting we’ve seen in a major Hollywood film since Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist. Having
Robin Williams play
Dwight Eisenhower comes a close second, and
Liev Schreiber as
Lyndon B. Johnson isn’t much better. The decades-spanning drama tries so hard to create a moving, seemingly accurate look at the titular character’s time spent on the staff at the White House during turbulent times that these missteps stand out particularly strongly, especially when compared to lookalike contest winners
James Marsden’s
JFK and
Alan Rickman’s
Ronald Reagan. Casting moderately big names in these roles
serves more as a distraction than anything since it’s not always a good fit of actor and historical figure. Johnson holding meetings while on the toilet may be funny, but not nearly as funny as the idea of the ancient looking president being played by the relatively youthful Schreiber. You can call us unimaginative,
but we expect a little bit of realism and consistency from our overlong historical dramas, thank you very much.
With a script from “Recount” and “Game Change” writer Danny Strong, the film is based on the true story of White House butler Eugene Allen, here called Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker). As a black child on a Georgia plantation in 1926, Cecil witnesses his mother (Mariah Carey) being taken away to be raped, and then sees his father (David Banner) shot and killed a few feet away from him. Violence permeates “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” from its opening moments in Macon, and even though Cecil is given a more comfortable job in the plantation owner’s home, he is not beyond hardship. When he leaves the plantation, he earns a spot working in a hotel and eventually works his way to a fancy Washington, DC hotel and then the White House.
The film walks through Cecil’s time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, beginning with Eisenhower’s term in 1957, moving through JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan’s reigns. We’re only shown historical footage of Presidents Ford and Carter, which is probably for the best because Daniels would have likely cast Zac Efron and Matthew McConaughey as the 38th and 39th presidents, respectively. Though Cecil remains staunchly apolitical, his son Louis (David Oyewelo) first joins the civil rights movement as a Freedom Rider, then the Black Panthers. He and Louis clash throughout their relationship, much to the sadness of his alcoholic wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey). Meanwhile, there’s consistency in Cecil’s duties as a butler, with the changing man at the top doing little to affect what he actually does on a day-to-day basis.
“Lee Daniels’ The Butler” is the type of film that will likely please viewers who feel that they’re doing their civic duty by learning about history and experiencing the trauma of the civil rights movement. The drama does focus on several key touchstones that should never be forgotten, including the aftermath of Emmett Till’s murder, the Freedom Riders, and the Woolworth’s sit-in. But there are issues of tone, vaulting the audience between laughter and tears in a way that feels manipulative and not particularly skilled. There's no real directorial stamp here; it could have been made by anyone with moviegoers none the wiser, which is why the legally required name change from "The Butler" to "Lee Daniels' The Butler" seems particularly unsuitable. Daniels’ “Precious” was a far more effective look at how an individual was affected by her environment, depending more on strong performances than less-than-subtle nudges toward feeling.
That’s not to say that there aren’t solid performances here. As Cecil, Whitaker portrays the butler as a human being, a testament to both the actor and screenwriter Strong. Cecil is impressive in his work, but his relationship with his son is tough to watch at times. It would’ve been easy to cast him as a saint, but the familial conflict adds an interesting depth to the character and the story. Whitaker ages well with the character, allowing Cecil to feel the weight of gravity and the passing years. Winfrey gets to show consistent range, between her frustration at her husband’s dedication to his job, her struggles with the bottle and her varying relationships with family and friends. She’s the rare actress that we’d like to see more of.
As Cecil’s fellow butlers, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz are good additions, with Gooding Jr. getting to be enjoyable raunchy (or at least as enjoyably raunchy as he can be in a PG-13 movie with some odd, off-putting sounds to cover his least appropriate dialogue). Terrence Howard is reliably slimy as the Gaines’ family friend. The rest of the enormous cast shows up for only a few minutes, with appearances from Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan, Minka Kelly as Jackie Kennedy, as well as Alex Pettyfer and Vanessa Redgrave.
“Lee Daniels’ The Butler” could be an important film that comes at a time
where race is still a challenging topic for America, but it succeeds less as a film than as a history lesson. It’s a movie that so clearly wants to be something important and Oscar-worthy,
but it’s August release points to evidence that it doesn’t quite achieve its dreams.
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IndieWire Film Review : LovelaceNot so much a film about
Linda Lovelace as a film about a bunch of things that happen to Linda Lovelace, including a destructive marriage to seemingly complete, total, bonafide scumbag sonofabitch
Chuck Traynor, "
Lovelace" is a glossy, starry package featuring loving '70s set design, costuming and narratively crucial hairstyling (more on that later). But, the main question was always around the casting of the leading lady, especially given that the last few years have seen a flurry of names come and go from both this and rival Lovelace project “
Inferno” (which famously once boasted Seyfried’s “
Mean Girls” co-star
Lindsay Lohan). Yes, Lovelace was herself by many accounts a very sweet and warm person,
but she was also the first porn superstar,
and later on a vocal anti-porn crusader; we knew Seyfried could play the white swan,
but could she play the black swan? Actually she probably could have, if she had been given the right script:
Seyfried’s performance is the best thing about the film by miles,
it’s just a shame there isn’t more to her role.
It’s a weird paradox: Seyfried’s Lovelace gets a lot of screen time, but rarely to herself. Instead she’s there for things to happen to: to be beaten or controlled or hired out for rape by husband-of-the-year Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), to be talked about and talked at by the various men who, essentially, own her, who see her not only as an object of sexual desire, but increasingly as a cash cow. Rarely does she display any agency of her own, and yes, we do know that is an accurate reflection of what happens in many abusive spousal relationships, (and possibly of the sexual politics at the time, especially in the porn industry), we just wish we saw more of it through Lovelace’s eyes. She may have been submissive, but she wasn’t absent or vegetative, so why can’t we get inside her head? Why can’t we understand the psychology behind her submissiveness? A thrown away “my mom told be to obey my husband” just doesn’t cut it, and in any case that’s taken directly from presumably real footage of an interview on the "Donahue" show. What does “Lovelace” tell us about Linda Lovelace that is not already part of the public domain?
Not a lot, really. In only covering the period between the lead up to and the implosion of her relationship with Traynor, the film reads more as“Linda & Chuck: Portrait Of the Shittiest Marriage In History” than as “Lovelace.” And the structure only compounds that: in a self-conscious and not wholly successful stylistic flourish, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“Howl”) tell the main part of the story twice. First, we get the "outward appearance" part: happy wedding day, joyfully learning the skill that will make her famous, meeting Sammy Davis Jr. at a screening, and being flattered and complimented by Hugh Hefner (James Franco). Then a title appears and we’re six years later and Linda is strapped up to a polygraph requested by the publishers of her tell-all book before we confusingly jump back in time again. This time we get longer, fuller cuts of many of the scenes mentioned above, in which the sexual violence is revealed to have begun on her wedding night, and Hefner is revealed to have followed up his compliments and flattery with a demand for oral sex. The problem here again is that we are getting entirely new information, not ‘seeing the same scenes from Linda’s point of view,’ as is probably the intent. So what could have been a useful device in helping us understand what was going on in Lovelace’s head instead just ends up muddying the narrative waters. At times, it’s only Linda’s hairstyle that really tells us where we are in the story: “ah, it’s the big corkscrew perm, so we’re post-marriage, but pre ‘Deep Throat.’ ”
So what of the famous movie itself? Strange to say, this section is probably the blandest in the whole film, with the sexism of the producers (Hank Azaria, A Terrible Wig, Bobby Cannavale—yes, the wig does deserve its own credit) played for laughs, the shoot coming across as kind of a lark for all concerned, and Lovelace’s “Did I do something wrong?” when her amazing talent makes co-star Harry Reems (Adam Brody) come too soon, surely just too guileless to be believed. The filming of the scene also marks a kind of turning point in the story; as frothy and “Carry On Doctor” as it is, from here on out everything gets worse for Linda, as Chuck gets deeper into debt, especially to Mafioso "investor" Romano (Chris Noth), and deeper into drugs. But despite all the drama and the increasingly extreme violence Lovelace suffers, this is also the point at which the film starts to lose our interest.
We come back again to our biggest bugbear. Without a real sense of what made Lovelace tick,
the rest of the runtime simply becomes an abstract experiment in wondering at what point the abuse will get so bad that she will leave. And with the film so firmly on her side, we are allowed no illuminating details that might cast her as anything but a victim of the evil machinations of others—rumours of her own drug abuse, and the counter-arguments to her portrayal of Traynor may as well not exist as far as this film is concerned.
The whitewashing is counterproductive; we might not have liked Linda quite so much if we caught a glimpse of her own dark side or met a few of her own internal demons, but we certainly would have understood her better. Truth is, despite Seyfried’s gameness,
we come away a little deadened from the experience and knowing precious little more than before about the person who inhabited the body, the life
and the throat of Linda Lovelace.
IndieWires Final Grades for both films :
C+
