High Hopes

            Last night, I saw the movie The Butler with my mom, dad, and sister. With such a studded cast, including Forrest Witaker, Oprah Winfrey, Lenny Kravitz, Cuba Gooding Jr, Alan Rickman, James Marsden, John Cusack, Terrence Howard, Alex Pettyfer, and Mariah Carey (just to name a few), The Butler set the stage for some high expectations. However, this super star cast was not the only thing that gave me such high expectations as I was grabbing a rickety red seat in the movie theater.

            When I saw the trailer for The Butler, I cried. I don’t know if that’s something you’re not supposed to admit, but alas, it’s true. I cried watching the trailer. It gave me chills. It even made me create a new note on my iPhone for “Best Movie Trailers”. Both the dramatic music and the clips they pulled from the movie made this trailer an amazing experience all on it’s own. I have a new respect for trailer-makers; it takes a special talent to condense a two-hour movie into two minutes, and still make it so powerful. For those of you who don’t have the time to go sit in a movie theater for two hours, I encourage all of you to please please please watch this trailer!!

            However, with such high expectations, I was slightly disappointed by the movie. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate it. I thought the actors all did a phenomenal job and this insider’s view of the white house kept me intrigued throughout the entire movie. Yet, I think they tried to do too much in too little time. Spanning the life of Cecil Gaines, this movie tried to cover his childhood, his adolescence, eight presidential terms in the white house, AND his retirement. I thought each of these snapshots were intriguing, and liked seeing the timeline of Cecil Gaines’ life played out on screen. However, the level of detail that they were able to go into was minimal due to the amount of time they were trying to cover. I wanted to hear more about Cecil’s childhood, get a longer glimpse of each of the presidents, dive deeper into his relationship with his wife and sons. Maybe that’s the problem with such a studded cast, there are so many good actors that you think they all deserve more screen time. But if they all got the screen time they deserved, the movie would go from being two-hours long to twelve hours. In particular, I wanted to hear more from Alan Rickman and James Marsden as Reagan and JFK. Like, what is Addison’s Disease? They never fully explained it, and it made me feel stupid for not knowing more about our thirty-fifth president. By skimming over so many years of our country’s history, director Lee Daniel’s made this movie for the history-buffs, who were able to fill in the blanks as the movie went on.

            Also, I didn’t think that Jane Fonda was a good choice for Nancy Reagan. There are certain celebrities who make their political views part of their persona, and Jane Fonda is one of them. While I understand that Fonda’s primary job is to act, her visit to Hanoi during the Vietnam War forever changed the way the public sees her. With this in mind, casting her as a Republican first lady seems a bit distasteful. I don’t want to read too much into it, but I guess I just wish they had cast someone else.

            Even though there were elements of this movie that I was less than pleased with, I still enjoyed film a lot! Forrest Whitaker did a fabulous job taking us from point A to point B, and I fell in love with his character from the very beginning. Also, I’m sure it’s a good problem to have when you wanted the movie to be longer, meaning that everyone did such a great job that I wanted to sit in those uncomfortable theater seats even longer. All in all, The Butler is a movie that could have been better, but could have been worse, too. I think the trailer just set too high of expectations for me to give it an A+.

            SCREENPLAY PAGES WRITTEN: 59

            NOVEL PAGES WRITTEN: 115