And that scene where Cecil lands his first job as a waiter after being caught stealing food by a sympathetic senior butler who helps him turn his life around? Just for the movie.Īs Cecil’s wife, Gloria, Oprah Winfrey gives the film’s most layered performance. He was a plantation houseboy in Virginia and did, as Cecil does in the film, leave in the pursuit of better employment. The woman in charge of the plantation (Vanessa Redgrave) takes pity on him and makes him a houseboy, the beginning of his life-long career as a domestic.Īllen, however, was born in Virginia, and, according to Haygood, never spoke bitterly about his upbringing or hinted at the monstrosities depicted in the film. After his mother (Mariah Carey, in a wordless performance) becomes catatonic after being raped by the plantation owner (Alex Pettyfer) and his father is subsequently murdered, Cecil is essentially orphaned. The Butler, with its Forrest Gump-like ambition to touch on every significant moment and movement in the country’s 20th century racial history, begins by showing Cecil Gaines on a Georgia plantation picking cotton with his father (David Banner). So how much is real and how much has been slightly embellished? Here’s your guide. In The Butler, Whitaker’s Cecil Gaines is a slightly fictionalized version of Allen, one whose story-though very close to Allen’s own-plays better as the stylistic, sweeping melodrama the film sets out to be. Now, however, Allen’s story is playing out on the big screen in an Oscar-baiting film with a sprawling cast including Robin Williams, Terrence Howard, Alan Rickman, Jane Fonda, Liev Schrieber, Oprah Winfrey, and, in the role inspired by Allen, Forest Whitaker. The film was inspired by a 2008 Washington Post story titled “ A Butler Well Served by This Election,”which first brought Allen’s story to the mainstream: a butler who served every president from Truman to Reagan and weathered the worst of the country’s brutal racial history was about to see the first black president of the United States sworn into office.Īllen was “a black man unknown to the headlines,” Will Haygood wrote in that Post article. The life of that man, Eugene Allen, is the basis for Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which debuts in theaters this weekend.
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