When Cecil leaves the farm, he trains as a butler under a mentor (Clarence Williams II), learns how to perfect his craft in a white man's world, and how to have "two faces," one his own, and the one that "they" want to see. His excels at his job in a fancy hotel in D.C. and is one day picked out by a man who happens to be in charge of the household staff at the White House, for his restraint and refusal to offer a political opinion that would be displeasing to the white men discussing the integration of schools. Cecil is then employed at the White House during the Eisenhower years and goes on to watch as history unfolds around and outside him. There is a contrast drawn between Cecil's dutiful submissiveness and his own son Louis's burgeoning activism, and it is Louis (David Oyelowo) who goes off to take part in nearly every significant event of the civil rights movement, including sit-ins, the Freedom Riders, the Black Panthers, to even being in the room when Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. The transitions between these historical events is the weakest part of the film, bogging down the middle sections and edging at times close to a pop-up book version of history- but the acting is so strong that it tends to carry the film through any structural awkwardness.
Oprah Winfrey is Cecil's wife Gloria, and it's her who provides the humor of the film, as she spends a lot of time in a drunken haze, but never veers toward campiness, and there's a great emotional subtlety in the lifelong connection between Cecil and Gloria, despite her falling into a tryst with a boozy neighbor played by Terence Howard. Even Oyelowo manages to make his character feel real- in spite of essentially being written as a symbol for 60's activism and civil rights workers, he projects a sincere authority and a strong screen presence. The presidential cameos, which seem silly at first glance (my theater chuckled at Robin Williams' first appearance as Eisenhower), actually worked overall, as none of them are on screen long enough to make a heavy impression on the story and simply serve as our way of seeing how events are changing the policies (if not the personal attitudes) of each successive administration, while Cecil stands silently by in the background, hearing and seeing it happen. My favorites were John Cusack, who gives us a surprisingly shrewd and subtle Nixon, and James Marsden as Kennedy, who's normally very easy to caricature, played here with genuine, angst-ridden sensitivity.
But the movie belongs to Whitaker, who infuses every scene with an internal dignity that's just impossible to put out, and he makes a character who would at first seem hard to particularize, due to his innate conservative nature, into an overwhelmingly moving and sympathetic figure whose life we want to immerse ourselves in. Indeed, the film works best when it's exploring the quiet, specific interactions between Cecil and Gloria, or Cecil and the various other butlers, offering us the example of his life as the generation prior to the civil rights movement, whose worldview persisted in the face of massive social upheaval. Eventually, his own heart is changed many years after the civil rights protests, in a heartbreaking scene when he realizes the courage his son has displayed to move the nation in the right direction.
