Slave quarters

Lee Daniels' The Butler

Crit

But first, a quiz. If you don't already know, match each president to the actor who plays him in this film (answers below):

Eisenhower    John Cusack
Kennedy        James Marsden
Johnson         Alan Rickman
Nixon            Liev Schreiber
Reagan          Robin Williams

This was what a friend calls a "homework" movie: one that you feel like you should see far more than one you actually want to see it. Well, as our teachers told us: not only is homework good for you, but sometimes you discover rewards you didn't expect.

Unsubtle but powerful and surprisingly complex, the film gains strength from a remarkable cast led by Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey, but its heart is the beautiful and sometimes brilliant direction by the often suspect Daniels. He's at his best with juxtapositions that are perhaps obvious in retrospect but arresting in the moment: violence against the Greensboro lunch counter protesters played off against the military precision of black servants at a White House state dinner; JFK's greatest civil rights speech segueing into gunshots in Dallas, LBJ's into napalm in Vietnam. The polemics of the film are unarguable at this point, but the emotional impact is the result of great filmmaking.

And to get back to the quiz, Daniels's casting choices for the most important white people in the film are--with the exception of pretty boy Marsden as pretty boy Kennedy--stunningly counterintuitive but uniformly perfect: wacky Williams as Wonder Bread Ike, the eternal innocent Cusack as Tricky Dick, the restrained Jew Schreiber as the volcanic redneck Johnson, and the plummily British Rickman as Cowboy Ronnie. Williams, Schreiber, and Rickman are heavily made up to look the respective parts, though still readily identifiable by their voices, but the only obvious prosthetic for Cusack is the trademark ski nose. What fun!

Trailers

• August: Osage County--Looks stagily unpromising, but a great cast.
• The Best Man Holiday--Oh, dear.
• Saving Mr. Banks--Who knows how the film will be, but the trailer is a brilliant piece of misdirection, making your shoulders slump at the thought that Disney is remaking Mary Poppins. But no: it's the story of Walt Disney (Tom Hanks, in the latest installment of his "Saving" series) wooing author P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson) for the film rights, and of Travers educating Disney on the book's meaning. Could still be terrible, but the premise and the casting make for a strong start.