Entertainment

‘Butler’ serves up heavy-handed drama

“Lee Daniels’ The Butler’’ is a star-filled, if heavy-handed, labor of love that certainly has its heart in the right place, and scores dramatically often enough to recommend it.

Forest Whitaker — an Oscar winner as Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland” — is superlative as a White House butler who serves under seven presidents. There are some really powerful moments depicting the civil rights struggle, a fairly rare subject for American movies these days.

I wish I didn’t have some reservations about it, but I do. Whitaker is wonderfully subtle in suggesting the inner turmoil of a character whose job mandates subservience.

Although director Lee Daniels dials things down a bit here, subtlety is not what he does. That strategy worked for “Precious’’ but turned his more recent “The Paperboy’’ into a feature-length howler.

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I also had some qualms about the contrivances and manipulations that abound in Danny Strong’s screenplay, which turns a real-life White House butler named Eugene Allen into the fictional composite Cecil Gaines, whose family is repeatedly thrust into key historical moments a la “Forrest Gump.”

“The Butler’’ does not begin particularly promisingly. Waiting for an audience with President Obama (who is not depicted), the elderly Cecil flashes back to a 1926 Georgia cotton farm, where we see his father shot to death by the owner’s son who has taken liberties with his mother (Mariah Carey, who leads a parade of celebrity cameos with a nonspeaking role).

Jackie Kennedy (Minka Kelly), President Kennedy (James Marsden) and daughter Caroline (Chloe Barach) greet the White House staff.

Jackie Kennedy (Minka Kelly), President Kennedy (James Marsden) and daughter Caroline (Chloe Barach) greet the White House staff. (AP)

The more compassionate owner (Vanessa Redgrave!) selects young Cecil for training as a house servant. Cecil becomes so skilled at unobtrusively serving white folk that, as an adult, his boss at a Virginia hotel (Clarence Williams III) recommends him for an important plum in Washington.

Colman Domingo is very good as the maitre d’ supervising the (underpaid) all-black domestic staff, who lays down strict rules for Cecil: “There is no room for politics in the White House’’ and “You hear nothing, you see nothing.’’

What we see, though, is a parade of famous and semi-famous actors made up to play presidents beginning with Robin Williams, whose Eisenhower is around just long enough for Cecil to express amazement that Ike has ordered out troops to back up court-ordered school integration.

Unsurprisingly, much more time is devoted to deifying John F. Kennedy (a curiously cast James Marsden) and his widow Jackie, who returns from her husband’s Dallas assassination in November 1963 and shows off her blood-strained dress to the stunned Cecil, who then reads a bedtime story to soothe Caroline Kennedy.

It might have been fun to have Cecil sneaking Marilyn Monroe into the White House, but you won’t see that — or an unflattering story that his real-life model, Allen, told about watching JFK wince when black celebrity Sammy Davis Jr. arrived for a reception with his white wife.

By this point, Cecil’s older son Louis (an excellent David Oyelowo) has chosen to embrace political activism as a member of the Freedom Riders, who risked (and sometime lost) their lives while confronting racism in the South head-on.

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Daniels boldly cuts between Cecil carrying out his duties at White House state dinners with very well-staged scenes of Lou participating in lunch counter sit-ins, and, more horrifyingly, traveling on a Freedom Riders bus firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan.

These scenes are a valuable reminder of a time in fairly recent history that many younger American are only vaguely aware of, if at all.

More dubious is the film reducing American presidents to crude caricatures — Lyndon Johnson (a terrible Liev Schreiber) talks about his landmark civil rights legislation while sitting on a toilet and dropping the N-word with Cecil standing dutifully at his side.

Though John Cusack makes an amusing Richard Nixon — first seen electioneering the staff (including turns by Cuba Gooding Jr., primarily providing comic relief, and Lenny Kravitz) in the kitchen as vice president — basically his term is reduced to a drunk and paranoid Tricky Dick assuring the ubiquitous Cecil that he will “never” resign over Watergate.

The film’s dramatic thrust is the growing rift between the apolitical Cecil and son Louis, who is conveniently on hand in Memphis when Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated (just after patiently lecturing Louis that servants like Cecil can be subversive).

Cecil briefly gets caught up in the riots that follow, but father and son become estranged when Louis — who has come to regard the old man as something of an Uncle Tom — joins the more radical Black Panthers.

After skipping over the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the film’s final stretch contains Jane Fonda’s much-anticipated appearance as first lady Nancy Reagan. What amounts to a glorified cameo runs for a couple of brief scenes that are highly sympathetic, as Nancy invites a stunned Cecil and his wife as guests to a state dinner.

Far less flattering is the depiction of her husband, who has far more screen time as Ronald Reagan (Alan Rickman, fresh from a Madame Tussaud’s makeover). Though he worries to Cecil that he “may be on the wrong side of the race issue,’’ Reagan decides to veto congressional trade sanctions against the racist apartheid government of South Africa.

The disgusted Cecil decides to retire and join Louis outside the South African embassy for a protest that lands both of them in jail — a change of heart that the story in no way prepares us for.

Oprah Winfrey gets second billing for relatively few scenes as Cecil’s long-suffering wife, who between worrying about Louis being killed or arrested and her husband’s long hours of work, starts hitting the bottle. She also has an affair with a hunky neighbor played by Terrence Howard.

Winfrey — who hasn’t acted on the big screen in 15 years — has been encouraged by Daniels to do some serious chewing that borders on cringe-inducing. Rather than seeming to be in the same movie as the dignified Whitaker, it’s more like she’s doing Elizabeth Taylor’s role in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’’

The wife passes away just before Obama’s election, which the film none-too-subtly couches as the second coming of JFK.

“The Butler’’ is a mixed bag that often tries way too hard to wring tears and shock from the audience. But when it comes to underserved subject matter like this, you have to give props, even for a flawed attempt like this.