We joined with many last night who have appreciated Lee Daniel’s production of The Butler, a fictionalized take on the real Eugene Allen, a White House butler for 34 years. Both actual and fictional, negro, butlers joined the White House staff during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and retired under Ronald Reagan and so lived the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam war from a doubly unique vantage point.  What Gene Allen saw or said little is known, other than the 2008 Washington Post article by Wil Haygood, which was the inception of the movie, and his obituary. Those who criticize the film for inaccuracy [Allen had one son, never a political activist, and Cecil Gaines played by Forest Whitaker, has two] miss the point.  The events shown are beyond dispute, which is what people come away remembering.  Real people were there; real people made history.  The Butler helps us imagine both those who were on the front lines and those who watched in witness, sometimes with deeply conflicting feelings.

The lunch counter sit-ins by peaceful negro students met with viciousness at every level, from verbal abuse, to spitting and stomping churn the emotions all over again.  That these are actors mirroring actual events increases the visceral impact; that they are shown role-playing similar savagery before going to meet the real thing, doubles it again.  The May 44, 1961 firebombing of a Freedom Riders’ bus, cutting between acted footage and black and white photos of the actual scene is visually and emotionally powerful.

Gains himself only catches glimpses of these events in newspapers and on television, sometimes while at work in the White House. We are witness through a filmic slight-of-hand:  Gain’s oldest son, Louis [David Oyelowo], a nominal student at Fisk University, is there against his father’s wishes.  We have a more intimate view than he.  What we do get is a father’s fear for his son’s safety and later, anger at his actions, while as a butler, he is to “see nothing and hear nothing.”

Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey as Gloria Gaines, the butler’s wife,  are a wonderful duo, moving from young parents with two young sons to elderly grandparents who have lost one child to war and regained another after decades of estrangement.  Anyone who thinks of Winfrey as simply a celebrity talk-show host will quickly revise that: she is entirely credible as a mother, of young boys and a dead son,  a sometimes-lonely wife, a friend among women friends, a drinker, on and off the wagon.  Whitaker, despite some swallowed up lines, is terrific, managing the degree of deference needed to succeed in the white man’s world, living in a plausible tension with his activist son and with a fine dignity later in life, arguing for equal pay for equal work between black and white staff.

Cuba Gooding, Jr. is always fun to watch and does a good job in a minor role as Gain’s co-worker — though apparently, the movie over-states the number of black workers in the White House during those years.

Some U.S. presidents are represented by actors, others appear only in historical footage.  The shock of non-resemblance of say Robin Williams to Dwight D. Eisenhower or Alan Rickman to Ronald Reagan tips us into “Oh, this is a movie,” while the uncanny resemblance of Jane Fonda to Nancy Reagan is an irony that most will enjoy.

Where the film is awkward, despite the fine acting and good script, is in its text-book recounting of the important mile-stones of the Civil Rights movement.  What we see comes less out of the life of a man, or men, than out of a film-maker’s feeling that A and B and C should be included. There is something of the graphic novel’s story board feel to it.  Nevertheless, there are few enough cinematic accounts of those years (as against war movies for example) and this one is welcome.  For those to whom these events are news, it may set them off on a search for other accounts, personal and historical, text and film to enlarge and deepen understanding of incredible people in difficult times. They could do worse than follow the life of John Lewis, one of the original Freedom Bus riders and a longtime member of Congress.

If we can have 69 pages of Vietnam war movie titles we should at least have as many of the Civil Rights struggle.  Plenty of room for many more.