There used to be a time when the History Channel was jokingly called by a Los Angeles radio personality the Hitler Channel. At any given time you could turn on the station and see something about World War 2, specifically there would be shows about Germany and the war. The shows about WW2 and Germany were guaranteed to get ratings, even though with a title like the History Channel you would expect to see a lot more subject matter than one section of the human experience.

The Butler isn’t a bad movie on the surface. It’s a basic, by the numbers historical drama. The historical drama is the star of the movie and the actors are pawns used to move the audience through the history. The problem I have with this movie is, like the History Channel of old, the focus on one segment of history in the black community. The characters in the story aren’t real. Yes I know they are based on real people, and I would say it is more inspired by real people, but the movie is about a specific black experience in America and not about the people who lived through the experience.

Because of that The Butler to me is a movie that might have had potential but covers territory that many other films and television shows have covered in the past. Of course, like the History Channel, it could be said there are lots of stories of the civil rights movement so why not tell those varied stories? This is where I think cultural differences are going to cause different groups to have divergent opinions about the film. A few years ago, the movie The Help came out. Like The Butler, it was praised by many critics for its powerful portrayal of a turbulent time in our country’s history. Like The Butler there was Oscar buzz about the film. Like The Butler, if you looked at the comment section of black online publications like The Grio, you would see a surprising number of black movie goers who didn’t like The Help. The complaint was instead of addressing issues today or use factual stories about real people at the time, The Help over dramatized the struggle of black people, made focus more of the liberal whites of the time, and essentially produced a feel good movie that showed the slow, dignified black person could win over racist whites by being stoic and true to the non-violent struggle.

Words to that effect were used in The Butler when it was explained to the son why he should be proud of his father the butler. You can go back to movies like Mississippi Burning and even to Imitation of Life where you will see the long suffering black person who endures years of segregation and mistreatment, only to win over the hearts and minds of the people they were in contact with in old age, just before dying. If you had one or two films with this pattern it might be considered a fluke but every major motion picture that ventures into history follows the same pattern. Just this year you had the film 42, about Jackie Robinson, and it did the same thing. It had the same complaint as The Help and The Butler by many in the black community because the film focused on the struggle and not the man.

Before I wrote the review I had a number of non-black friends who told me they liked or loved the film. When I saw the film in the theater, in which I was the only black in the theater (I checked) the audience loved the picture. They liked Oprah, Whitaker and all the other cast members. If I had to guess, I would say they haven’t seen many black films of this era. Maybe the experience was new to them and it could have been seen as fresh and original.  To me it was a story I have seen many times, with the same cast of characters and it was boring to me. By becoming a history lesson instead of a story of a man living his life the movie became a teaching tool. It was an after school special with a happy ending, where bad people could be moved by the power of love and where stoic people would suffer for decades before realizing ‘the dream.’