Lee Daniels' Precious (left) and The Butler (right)
I reviewed Lee Daniels'Precious for Frontpage Magazine in 2010. Here is an excerpt from the article:
Daniels’s direction wields flickers of sullen, angry expressions out of Gabourey’s [the actresses performing as Precious] ballooning face, but he cannot get us to entirely sympathize with her. This is partly due to Gabourey’s unimpressive acting, which shows little emotion or variation. Daniels’s sophomoric camera techniques also detract from his character by unsuccessfully vacillating between the jumpy cameras of the French New Wave, oblique (Dutch) angles, and super-saturated fantasy sequences. The only one that works is the cinema verité documentary style, where the unforgiving camera gives the obese Precious a looming, lethargic presence...This is exactly the kind of ambiguity the permeates throughout The Butler, Lee Daniels' latest, and much hyped film.
...Precious is not a very pleasant character. She steals food from a restaurant. She knocks around a young neighbor who only wants her friendship. We realize by the end of the film that she has an unforgiving spirit...
The soul-destroying welfare world of black single mothers [that Precious inhabits] has now become worthy of black artists. Yet, Daniels is ambivalent about its treatment. He gives Precious enough freedom to make her own decisions, but he never lets her out of the system. He wants Precious both as victor and as victim. Like him, countless staff in government-subsidised and welfare agencies constantly push and pull at the likes of Precious. Ultimately, they cater to their own fulfillment – whether financial, ideological, or political – rather than give their wards an honest helping hand.
Like Precious, The Butler is a film adaptation from written material: a Washington Post article titled A Butler Well Served by This Election: Moving Up, but Slowly, written in 2008 by Washington Post staff writer Wil Haygood. The election in question is Obama's in 2008, and Haygood was covering Obama's campaign rally in Chapel Hill in 2008. The Washington Post article is supposed to portray the true story of Eugene Allen, or as the film informed us, it was "inspired by true events." Haywood has now written a short book (112 pages), which just came out in July 2013, expanding on his article, titled The Butler: A Witness to History. Here is an excerpt from the book's chapter Moving Image, where Haywood becomes a film historian, comparing butlers through American film and television. Of course, it is the black Allen who gets shortchanged.
Yes, a butler.Haywood says this in an interview on The Hill, in July 2013:
It is such an old-fashioned and anachronistic term: the butler: Someone who serves people, who sees but doesn't see; someone who can read the moods of the people he serves. The figure in the shadows. Movie lovers fell in love with the butler as a cinematic figure in the 1936 film My Man Godfrey, which starred William Powell as the butler of a chaotic household. More recently, the butler figure and other backstage players have been popularized in the beloved television series Downton Abbey. My butler was a gentleman by the name of Eugene Allen. For thirty-four years, he had been a butler at the house located in Washington, DC, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which the world knows as the White House.
The Hill Question: So many people read your article in The Washington Post. What can we expect more of in the book?Allen has since died (in 2010).
Wil Haywood: The book is a much more in-depth look at the life of Eugene and Helene Allen. It also is a historical retrospective of the history of blacks in American cinema. It also has much more about certain presidents who Eugene and Helene Allen worked for and their battles with civil rights inside the White House.
Haywood continues in the interview:
[Allen] was alive to see the story and after the story came out. He and I got VIP tickets to [Obama’s] inauguration, and he was so happy about that. That was special treatment for both of us. And after the story came out, it was reprinted in newspapers all over the world.In the film, based on the article, Lee Daniels gave us a diluted version of events (he had to, in this era of lawsuits), but he did change a few things around, and taking artistic license. (I wonder how much of that will be corrected in Haywood's new book?).
For example:
- Eguene Allen (the butler), didn't watch his mother get raped, and his father shot by a white man (a slave owner) while they were slaves in a plantation in Georgia.
- He wasn't born in Georgia, but in Virginia.
- He had one son, but no daughter. His son served in Vietnam, and never in the Civil Rights movement. As far as Allen's biography tells us, there was no family dinner with his son's Black Panther girlfriend.
- He arrived in the White House in 1952 (it is not mentioned how he learned his butler skills), not during the Truman years as in the film.
- He didn't resign as head butler to protest Reagan's "support" of apartheid, but retired promoted as a maître d’hôtel in 1986
[These snippets of information are from a variety of sources including:
The Butler and the Obama Moment from National Review Online
The Butler Distorts Race Relations, from The Hoover Institute
The film craft behind The Butler is much better than the disjointed filmmaking in Precious. Yet, throughout The Butler, Daniels exaggerates his characters, making the whites evil, and the blacks who serve whites as servile and listless victims, and those who aren't either of these into righteously angry militants. His characters are no less caricatures in The Butler than in Precious, although Daniels seems to have improved on his filming craft since his Precious days, and made his caricatures more sophisticated in The Butler.
Forest Whitaker is endearing as The Butler, yet it is hard to imagine anyone, even one who serves the President, as being so self-effacing. Daniels' point is that the 20th century, post-slavery America, still expected the same kind of deferral and subservience from its black servants (workers) as did the slave owners from their black slaves. That is a whole other issue I won't go into, and even the thoroughly slavery accepting Gone With the Wind (fictional, but now part of American literary history) gives slaves more character and humanity (look at formidable Mamie and her fierce protection of Scarlett!).
Precious is the mirror-image of the butler: while he is excessively subservient, she is excessively aggressive; while he is immaculately dressed and mannered, she is grotesquely overweight and crass. In the end, they are both unrealistic portrayals of human beings, whose roles are primarily to play a political and social agenda: Evil Whites vs. Victimized Blacks.
Daniels is clever in The Butler. He gives a little to everyone. But the end result is that most people are not happy with his film: either he's too lenient toward whites, or he is too demeaning toward blacks (and of course, toward the butler).
Most critics look at his treatment of Ronald Reagan to point out as an example (of the example, and maybe the only one) of Daniels' negative portrayal of whites. But I think the whole film is subtly infused with it. And more discerning, and brave, public critics will begin to point this out, despite the high praise and Oscar-projections that everyone else is giving it.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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