“The Butler” turns poor Louis into a kind of African American Zelig, present at every key civil rights era turning point. That’s Louis sitting in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, getting fire-bombed on a Freedom Rider bus, getting assaulted by a fire hose in Birmingham, being with Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis just before he died, donning a beret and becoming a Black Panther as Carol’s hair morphs into an Angela Davis afro.
It’s not that all this stuff didn’t happen (see Stanley Nelson’s excellent Emmy-winning doc “Freedom Riders” to get the full story), but it strains credulity to have it all happen to one person, and all in the context of a strained father-son relationship.
Daniels’ pulp instincts do lead to vivid sequences such as the intercutting of a White House dinner with that Woolworth sit-in, but this is one significant film where less would have been a whole lot more.
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