Despite a lack of iron men, space battles, giant robots, men of steel, or cars driving fast, The Butler became the last big hit of summer. Did it play to the general public’s love for re-living the 50s/60s era? Or the fun of seeing famous actors play dead presidents? Or maybe it’s the Oprah factor; she’s a franchise unto herself after all. Or perhaps there’s a less “Hollywood” explanation. Perhaps, like the success of this year’s Jackie Robinson biopic, 42, there’s a thirst amongst the movie-going public to see black history play out on the big screen. Or maybe after a summer of sci-fi, superheroes and sequels, the people were just ready for an old-fashioned drama about someone in the corners of history, the man who quietly comes to work, does his job, raise a family, and changes the world in the process, without even knowing it.
On the other hand, maybe it was just that time at the end of the summer, where the audience is fed up with spectacle and yearns for genuine emotion. In 2011, Tate Taylor’s The Help told a similar story about black domestic servants in the 60s, and it would go on to Oscar glory, with four nominations and a Best Supporting Actress win for Octavia Spencer. One can see something similar in the future for The Butler, especially a Best Actor nod for Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, a character based on real-life White House butler Eugene Allen, who served through eight administrations. Through the lens of Gaines and his family, we see a tumultuous century of change and progress for civil rights, from a southern plantation in the 1920s to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. To the film’s credit, those 80 years unfold like a skillfully constructed narrative, not like some kind of info dump. The Butler doesn’t break the mould, but it shows you that when you use the mould right, you can make something very good.
[h2]Limited: The Act of Killing[/h2]
In all my years as a writer, and in studying the English language, I have yet to find a correlation between the word “gangster” and the expression “free man,” let alone anything to suggest that the origin of the word “gangster” comes from the term “free man.” Yet that’s the frequent repose of the men profiled in The Act of Killing, a startling documentary that got people talking this summer about serious matters other than the plot holes in Star Trek Into Darkness or what Shane Black did to The Mandarin in Iron Man 3. Even the most depraved horror movie can’t prepared you for the utter lack of humanity on display in The Act of Killing, and as world leaders debate intervention in Syria, moviegoers are reminded coldly of all the times in history when horrible things have been done to people, and the perpetrators not only got away with atrocious crimes but also kept their seats of power for years afterward. As observed by one former tyrant in the movie, “war crimes are defined by the winners.”
The premise of the film is that director Joshua Oppenheimer goes all Hamlet on the leaders of Indonesia’s death squads, hoping to catch their conscience, as it were, by encouraging them to re-enact their brutality on film in whatever manner they see fit. Impromptu street-side performances give way to elaborate sets, make-up effects and a cast of thousands and, all the while, men like Anwar Congo recount their brutality with barely a hint of remorse or regret. The men brag about their movie project saying that they want to make a movie more sadistic than any film about the Nazis. Congo shows the camera the places where accused Communists used to be rounded up and executed, including the building where he and his comrades killed so many people they dubbed it “the office of blood.” There are also clips shown of an anti-Communist propaganda film from the 60s that makes Carrie look like Saved by the Bell. What you end up walking away with, aside from a sense of revulsion, is that the conscience of monsters is far more complex than we’d like to think, or that they’d like to think, for that matter.
— Adam Donaldson
