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Director Lee Daniels (“Precious”) offers a poignant look at black American life in “The Butler,” a movie inspired by Eugene Allen, a real-life White House butler who served eight presidents. As good as the film is, too much has been made of its ties to reality. Although the onscreen protagonist – Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) – serves at the White House for decades, most of the movie’s dramatic arc is fiction.
It would appear that as usual, what's old is new again. Yet even by modern Hollywood standards, the mere act of humanizing Black domestic characters who were denied lines and had long stood silently in the shadows of white stars in countless iconic films including Father of The Bride, is revolutionary. While they may appear to simply be masculine and feminine versions of each other: Both focus on changing attitudes regarding race in American society, and both focus on generational and cultural divides between parents and their offspring.