Lee Daniels' The Butler movie review (2013)

"The Color Purple," arguably the greatest WWBB flick ever made, contains a gorgeous rendition of "Maybe God is Trying to Tell You Something" that sends a church congregation and choir out into the countryside to harmonize with juke joint sinners and sharecroppers. It was a fantasy of restoration: The preacher's wayward daughter reunites with her father; black folk stop fighting and fearing one another, gathering into something like a family (if not a force, which would be anathema to Hollywood's unwritten production code).

"Lee Daniel's The Butler" is a WWBB movie about the centuries-old split between House Negroes (the middle class) and Field Negroes (the working class/underclass), and about the clarifying shocks and upheavals required to heal the rift. Right up front, the filmmakers present a visual metaphor for black grief as horrific and eerily beautiful as the drowned wife in "Night of the Hunter" sitting in a car at the bottom of a lake, her hair undulating like some kind of angelic rays: two dead black men hung high by the neck, facing each other in a sad embrace. There is no snickering at this one.

Yet there's plenty of snickering and full-on laughter throughout "The Butler," which Lee Daniels directs in about five styles at once, like a Bollywood maestro. No, it's not a musical, but it makes plenty of visual music.

Everybody decries comparing mainstream "black" directors, but everybody secretly does it, so, what the hell, let's play: On the evidence of "The Butler" alone, I'd say Daniels will grow in greater esteem with cineastes than either pioneer Spike Lee or box office champ Tyler Perry. Daniels assimilates their scattershot styles and ambitions into his own alternately operatic, comic book, hyper-realistic, improvisatory and programmatic style. If Quentin Tarantino is a "mixtape" filmmaker, Daniels is a channel-surf director, flipping through several types of TV melodrama with confidence and a sense of righteous purpose—and sometimes even imagination that ranges beyond the cable dial.