The Butler

Directed by Lee Daniels

(PG-13)

***

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Perhaps never before has there been a mainstream history movie “so little concerned with what a white audience thinks,” said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. A fact-inspired story about a black man who served as a White House butler to presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan, this drama from the director of Precious proves most effective when it turns away from major events related to the civil rights struggle and simply shows what black American life felt like across those decades. The script “really is a bit silly,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. The title character has a Forrest Gump–like talent for quietly redirecting history at crucial moments, and the well-known actors brought in to play the presidents—John Cusack and Robin Williams among them—cause several White House scenes to “come off like a Rich Little convention.” Still, Forest Whitaker works wonders in the lead role, turning the butler into “a burning ember of humility and pride,” said Steven Rea in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “For all its faults,” Lee Daniels’s earnest hit drama possesses “an instinct for the truth.”