One way to judge a film like this, larded with your-are-there vignettes drawn more or less literally from recent history, is to judge how convinced you are that you are indeed there -- that the figures you are watching really are these presidents, or these Martin Luther Kings, or whoever. In this sense, things get off to a bumpy start: our first experience in the oval office, during the new butler's first day on the job, shows us Robin Williams (you never wonder "could that be Robin Williams?", of course: you know Robin Williams) playing Harry Truman and convincing us instantly that Robin Williams really was born to play Harry Truman. The problem is that he's actually supposed to be playing Dwight Eisenhower, which he does not at all convincingly. And it goes downhill from there.
From FDR on, each time a modern president is depicted in a movie as living through a Great Moment In History, anyone of a certain age will inevitably remember that particular voice and those cadences. In the case of this particular movie, none of the voices or cadences match up at all with the Real Thing -- I suppose you can give Lee Daniels and the various actors credit for not really trying, beyond a few unevenly sustained stabs at dialect and physical tic, but then neither does any of these performances rise much above the level of a mediocre SNL skit. (Well, maybe John Cusack, in one or two of his scenes, captures something real about the inner Richard Nixon, but this is not helped by there being nothing there of the exterior Richard Nixon, not even the heavy beard.) Jane Fonda gets closest with her Nancy Reagan (and what fun she must have had). Martin Luther King fares particularly poorly. We know who these guys are supposed to be only from the props and the plot cues, not because any of them is in any way convinces us that he is who he's supposed to be the way Daniel Day Lewis convinced us he was Lincoln. Of course, we don't know what Lincoln sounded like, we just think we know what he is supposed to have sounded like, which makes things easier. It's different with, say, LBJ. But, I guess the filmmakers decided, if you sit him on a toilet, we'll know it's him. (Poor Jimmy Carter, so masterfully skewered in so many SNL skits, doesn't even get a walk-on here.)
But, you might reason, the big historical figures are in this case only props. The story is about a young African American who emerges from the cotton fields to become a White House butler, serves the great and the good, but is still a member of his community at a particular time in history, the genuineness of all this certified by his being married to Oprah Winfrey. Here the verdict is more mixed. The intrusion of vignettes from the civil rights movement hurts, or at least doesn't help, the genuineness of the film, nor does the sitcom plotting of his family situation. But Forest Whitaker is an actor of such grace and fluidity that, over and over, he transcends his surroundings, giving life to scenes that would otherwise sink from their glunkiness. In doing this, he rescues the film from its otherwise suffocating literalness, and conveys what I think was always meant to be its core message, the one about the two faces African Americans have been forced by history to maintain, the ways in which so many have turned the lack of agency imposed upon them into very powerful agency. Along with talented colleagues, things come alive in the Downstairs segments of this Upstairs/Downstairs sitcom à l'américaine, and infuses parts of the film with a subtlety and multi-dimensionality it should have carried all along. For these scenes, and for Whitaker's performance pretty much throughout, this is a must-see film, even if you may need to grit your teeth through much the rest.
From FDR on, each time a modern president is depicted in a movie as living through a Great Moment In History, anyone of a certain age will inevitably remember that particular voice and those cadences. In the case of this particular movie, none of the voices or cadences match up at all with the Real Thing -- I suppose you can give Lee Daniels and the various actors credit for not really trying, beyond a few unevenly sustained stabs at dialect and physical tic, but then neither does any of these performances rise much above the level of a mediocre SNL skit. (Well, maybe John Cusack, in one or two of his scenes, captures something real about the inner Richard Nixon, but this is not helped by there being nothing there of the exterior Richard Nixon, not even the heavy beard.) Jane Fonda gets closest with her Nancy Reagan (and what fun she must have had). Martin Luther King fares particularly poorly. We know who these guys are supposed to be only from the props and the plot cues, not because any of them is in any way convinces us that he is who he's supposed to be the way Daniel Day Lewis convinced us he was Lincoln. Of course, we don't know what Lincoln sounded like, we just think we know what he is supposed to have sounded like, which makes things easier. It's different with, say, LBJ. But, I guess the filmmakers decided, if you sit him on a toilet, we'll know it's him. (Poor Jimmy Carter, so masterfully skewered in so many SNL skits, doesn't even get a walk-on here.)
But, you might reason, the big historical figures are in this case only props. The story is about a young African American who emerges from the cotton fields to become a White House butler, serves the great and the good, but is still a member of his community at a particular time in history, the genuineness of all this certified by his being married to Oprah Winfrey. Here the verdict is more mixed. The intrusion of vignettes from the civil rights movement hurts, or at least doesn't help, the genuineness of the film, nor does the sitcom plotting of his family situation. But Forest Whitaker is an actor of such grace and fluidity that, over and over, he transcends his surroundings, giving life to scenes that would otherwise sink from their glunkiness. In doing this, he rescues the film from its otherwise suffocating literalness, and conveys what I think was always meant to be its core message, the one about the two faces African Americans have been forced by history to maintain, the ways in which so many have turned the lack of agency imposed upon them into very powerful agency. Along with talented colleagues, things come alive in the Downstairs segments of this Upstairs/Downstairs sitcom à l'américaine, and infuses parts of the film with a subtlety and multi-dimensionality it should have carried all along. For these scenes, and for Whitaker's performance pretty much throughout, this is a must-see film, even if you may need to grit your teeth through much the rest.