Review: ‘Lee Daniels’ The Butler’ significant but often contrived

Five name actors, from Robin Williams as Dwight D. Eisenhower through Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan, play presidents Cecil Gaines served and not one of them is remotely believable. Movie audiences who’ve suffered for decades with unrealistic portrays of African Americans and Native Americans in multi-racial pictures are now being asked to do the same with Caucasians.

“The Butler” starts with a brief moment in the White House entrance hall with an aged and long-retired Gaines patiently waiting, we find out later, to meet a newly elected (but unseen) Barack Obama.

Then the film flashes back nearly eight decades, to 1926 in Macon, Ga., to an overly schematic (to put it mildly) world where 8-year-old Cecil’s happiness to be picking cotton with his father Earl (David Banner) is shattered when a drooling bigot (Alex Pettyfer) rapes his mother (Mariah Carey) and murders that father — on the same afternoon. But not before Earl has a chance to warn his son: “Don’t lose your temper with the man. It’s his world, we’re just living in it.”

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