In each of the four films he’s directed, Lee Daniels has created moments unlike anything else I’ve seen in American narrative cinema. To list a few examples: There’s R&B singer Macy Gray in Shadowboxer (2005), uncomfortably wearing heels and a fancy dress a few sizes too small, trying to break plans with a rich mobster she knows wants her dead, comically slurring, “I’m busy this weekend. I’ll be down at the Snooty Fox—it’s ladies’ night!” There’s the abused, impoverished teenager in Precious (2009) improbably watching Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960) on TV and imagining herself and her mother in the movie speaking perfect Italian. And there’s Gray again in The Paperboy (2012), playing a domestic in late-60s Florida, goofily pantomiming masturbation as part of a role-playing game she plays with the grown son (Zac Efron) of the family she works for, the act registering as innocent and presexual.
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Daniels laid out these themes in Shadowboxer, a film that was largely dismissed as camp upon its release but seems more meaningful in light of his subsequent work. The movie’s a deeply strange allegory about a taciturn hit man (Cuba Gooding Jr.) living in a professional and sexual partnership with his stepmother (Helen Mirren), who’s raised him since he was eight. Inuring himself to sexual abuse, the film implies, has conditioned him to kill without emotion. When his stepmother insists that they not murder a pregnant woman assigned as their mark, they end up taking her in and helping her raise her child. Improbably, the four establish something resembling a happy family life—and one that’s apparently blind to differences of age, sex, and race. That this utopian living arrangement is purchased with blood money is the film’s greatest irony.
The Butler, which opened last week, feels flagrantly artificial, even cheesy, in its design. The movie is loosely based on the life of Eugene Allen, an African-American man born on a Virginia cotton farm in 1919 who worked his way up the ladder to become head butler at the White House, where he served from the late 50s to the mid-80s. Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong use the overall shape of Allen’s life to create a historical epic about the African-American experience of the last 80 or so years, deploying the sort of historical shorthand that’s typical of glossy Hollywood biopics. The movie’s version of Allen, named Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), bears witness to major policy decisions about civil rights in the administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan. The filmmakers also give him an activist son, Louis (David Oyelowo), who takes part in major episodes of the civil rights struggle—riding on the Freedom Bus that gets bombed in 1962, meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. just before his assassination, and living with the Black Panthers at their Oakland headquarters in the early 1970s.
The film ends with a 90-year-old Cecil returning to the White House at the invite of Barack Obama. Daniels told me that he considers this the most beautiful part of the movie and that it’s the only scene he’s filmed that makes him cry. “[Cecil] finds himself,” he said, adding, “He recognizes that he’s been wrong about the civil rights movement” when he makes up with his son. The final moments of The Butler certainly feel uplifting—in keeping with the Hollywood formula the movie upholds, they practically have to—but I don’t feel they overpower the skepticism of what comes before. Perhaps the point is that the happy ending is a compromised one, given the protagonist’s lifelong insistence on compromise.
Directed by Lee Daniels
