The butler directed by Lee Daniels

LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER tells the story of a White House butler who served eight American presidents over three decades. The film traces the dramatic changes that swept American society during this time, from the civil rights movement to Vietnam and beyond, and how those changes affected this man's life and family.

Hi everyone
What I found interesting in the film is the impact of all these changes on the butler's family. The butler is like his job, He serves white people and disappears because he is part of the furniture. He can't understand his son Louis 's involvement in political action for the black rights neither his second son's death because he had enlisted in the army to fight in the  Vietnam war. He gradually opens his eyes and at the end of his life is present when Obama becomes president.

I have also been very interested with this film, which deals with the long period of struggle for justice and equality by the coloured people of the USA. But which makes me more interested is that it is about the true story of Eugene Allen (1952-1986), which means that it is no fiction (except for the more recent years). We enter in the inner life of Cecil Gaines, and share with him the feelings of coloured people at the time of discrimination, segregation, the southern so-called Jim Crow laws[*], and of the opposition from the Black Power (Malcom X),the Black Panthers, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King.

The film starts in 1926 with the murder of Cecil Gaines's father by a white man, a southern cotton-field owner and the boss of a number of "negroes". (The civil war ended in 1865, so the slave-trading has been over for many years, but there remains severe discrimination and segregation).
We witness in the film the appalling sequence of the middle-aged black husband and father who dares stare at the young white man returning from a forced love-session with his own wife, Cecil's mother. Hence the killing. But little Cecil has no right to cry. He becomes an orphan (as his mother loses her wits) and is appointed as a home-servant negro.

At his coming of age, he decides to leave the South and to travel northwards hoping for the best. This seems to come when he gets a job as a butler in the White House.
During the long period of time of his approaching the successive presidents and serving them, he will hear all private and secret  conversations, particularly those dealing with the major problems of this time, about which he is first concerned, especially because his eldest son belongs to the Black Panthers' movement, severely reprieved, and his second son decides to serve in Vietman, badly risky.

Nevertheless he always behaves dutifully as a patriot, and always remains silent. "Serving supposes to remain silent as if in an empty room" is the prevailing rule. This rule he will obey until he retires. And then becomes conscious of the absurdity of the Vietnam war, (his 2nd son is killed) and of the righteousness of the Black recognition (he meets his eldest son again).

The film ends with Barack Obama's election.

[Jim Crow laws : These were late 19th century laws in the Southern states which created segregation. They said that black people :
-could not eat in restaurants where white people ate,
-coul not wash their clothes in the laundries white people used,
-could not drink from the same water fountains as white people,
-could not sit next to white people in movie theaters. (Usually they had to sit upstairs in the balcony),
-had to sit in the back of buses.]