Lee Daniel's: The Butler

    I was really excited about this movie. The preview made me tear up, and that is a pretty hard thing to do, let alone in just a preview. I really want to read the book. I mean, how much more powerful can you get than the view of U.S. politics and history from inside the Whitehouse? O yea, make that view from a black man living through some of the most momentous racial events in our history. Add in powerhouse acting from Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, James Marsden, John Cusack, and David Oyelowo, just to name a few, and you have the formula for an amazing movie. However, this fell way short of expectations for me.
     The acting was great, the story was there, the history was there, the power and emotion were not. Maybe it's because they tried to add too much. I mean, one movie trying to tackle the Civil Rights movement, JFK and his death, the Nixon triumphs and failures, Vietnam, etc. on top of the story of a man trying to raise young, thoughtful black men in all of that history, is just too much. Something is going to get lost. In this movie, it was the feeling that was lost. For example, you feel JFK's death (even though he was only a fraction of the movie), but you do not feel Forest Whitaker's son's death. They try, Oprah Winfrey falls to pieces, it's thrown in to mess up the climax of the husband and wife's improving relationship, it's even the kid you like the most! But you still just don't feel it. You don't feel it when the other son comes back into the fold and reconnects with his father. You don't even really feel it when Oprah dies at the end. There is just too much there for the depth, the content, and the accuracy.
    On the other hand, my Aunt, who also lived through a lot of the events depicted, absolutely loved this movie. She felt it, but I think that was more because of her own experiences and memories and less because of the movie. Or, maybe I'm just heartless/have seen too many of these kinds of movies for this one to really resonate. Considering some of the other racially sensitive movies that have come out this year (Nelson Mandela, 12 Years a Slave), this falls short.
    In the end, I give this a 7 out of 10. It was good, it just didn't pull at my heart strings like it was supposed to.