The Butler

To shorten the time until midnight this New Year's Eve a friend and I decided to go watch a film, the options were limited, as a lot of theaters weren't open, but The Butler was one film I was interested anyway and it played right into our time frame.

The entirety of black history in the US happens to the family of Cecil Gaines. Cecil himself grows up picking cotton and witnesses the murder of his father that has no consequences to his owner, of course. His older son joins every black movement he finds, from the Freedom Buses to Martin Luther King to Malcolm X to the Black Panthers and finally to politics. The younger son dies in Vietnam. And his wife Gloria is an alcoholic for half of their live together to boot. 

But the actually interesting part is Cecil's work in the White House and his brush with the other side of history happening from the one his older son is on. He started serving in the Eisenhower administration and left under Reagan. He appeared to not be much of a fan of Nixon and took issue (or appeared to be) with Reagan's stance against a boycott of South Africa and his invitation to an event as a guest, seated on President Reagan's table. During the dinner he felt like he was there just for show.

The most memorable president of the lot for me, or rather the portrayal, was President Johnson. The scene with Johnson sitting on the toilet with some advisers and Cecil standing just outside the open door - Cecil handing the president prune juice. 

Cecil himself seemed to appreciate Johnson and Kennedy the most. He is shown wearing a tie that used to be Kennedy's and a tie clip given to him by LBJ when invited back to the White House to meet with Barack Obama.

So yeah, it's overloaded and sentimental. But this is an interesting slice of history.

7/10

Identity

The lawyer of Malcolm Rivers makes one last ditch effort to stay the execution of his client. Rivers, convicted of murdering six people a few years back is brought to a middle-of-the-night hearing, where the lawyer and a psychiatrist try to prove that he was not aware of what he was doing because of his multiple personality disorder.

The many people in Rivers' head all end up in a motel in the pouring rain that keeps them from getting where they want to go. The group is as random as can be, including a family with small child, a prostitute, an actress, a couple of criminals, a former cop...

What happens in the court hearing and is played out by the character in the motel is that the one personality that made Rivers kill has to be irradicated. To achieve this one by one the people at the motel get killed off until the sitting judge is convinced that the culprit is gone.

The real story in the film is what is going on at the motel. The characters don't seem to be aware of what they actually are in the bigger picture, so this plays out as a quite brutal whodunit. Each person that dies gets marked with a room key, counting the bodies down from 10 to 1. They all hurl accusations and cannot seem to find any common ground on how to handle their situtation. Halfway throught the killings, one of the most level-headed of the group, Ed, turns out to be the personality that the committee around Rivers can work with.

This is when the two stories overlap, Ed suddenly finds himself strapped to a chair a not recognizing himself in the mirror. He is confused as to how he is no longer in the pouring rain by the motel. But this really turns out to be the way in. When all but one of the characters at the motel are gone, the committee is satisfied with their progress and Rivers' death sentence is overturned.

However, on the way back to the prison the psychiatrist realizes to late that one of the personalities believed to have died in an explosion acutally survived and that was the very one they would have needed to eliminate. Deadly mistake.

Despite the flaws and the confusing set up I really, really enjoy this film.

8/10