Lee Daniels' The Butler, review Dir: Lee Daniels; Starring: Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, David Oyelowo, Terrence Howard, John Cusack, James Marsden, Live Schreiber, Robin Williams, Vanessa Redgrave, Alan Rickman. 12A cert, 132 min. Lee Daniels" The Butler, a historical drama about a long-serving White House manservant, feels so dehydrogenated and polyunsaturated that an apter title might have been Lee Daniels" I Can't Believe It's Not Butler. Daniels is one of America's more prominent black filmmakers, and his new picture is a state-of-the-nation piece about Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), a working-class African-American man who spends a significant part of the 20th century bringing very rich and powerful white men their toast and coffee on a silver tray. Danny Strong's script is based loosely on the life of Eugene Allen, who worked as a Presidential butler between the Truman and Reagan administrations and lived to see the election of Barack Obama in 2008: a neat, Hollywood postscript to the story. Instantly, your tastebuds starts to tingle, and you take your seat expecting heat and subversion, or at least a gutsy overturning of the Uncle Tom stereotype. And with good reason, too: Daniels's last two films were The Paperboy, a trashy Floridian melodrama, and Precious, a slice-of-hell social tract set in New York City, and neither one stinted on the fire and entrails. Well, not this time. The Butler glides inoffensively through 10 decades of US history, stopping off at as many epochal events as possible while taking great care not to spill the soup. The lesson of the film - and you know this is the lesson because Martin Luther King (Nelsan Ellis) is the one who delivers it, almost directly down the barrel of the camera - is that direct-action protest is only one option: a lifetime of servitude can change the world too. "The black domestic defies racial stereotypes by being hardworking and trustworthy," King explains to Louis Gaines (David Oyelowo), Cecil's estranged and politically active son, who is ashamed of his father's work. The conversation takes place in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, presumably a few minutes before King is gunned down on the balcony: this is absolutely typical of the film's I-Spy approach to history. King continues, to Louis and us: "While we perceive the butler as being subservient, in many ways they are subversive without even knowing it." What this means in practice is that Cecil inspires a string of US Presidents to take a more humanitarian line on matters of race through his unflappable commitment to shoe-shining and fork-polishing. The first is Dwight D Eisenhower (Robin Williams), who resolves to end racial segregation in the American education system after a casual chat with Cecil about his own two boys" schooling. Later, John F Kennedy (James Marsden) learns that Cecil's son took part in the Freedom Riders protests, and delivers the Civil Rights Address shortly after. The film also boasts fancy-dress-party appearances from Liev Schreiber as Lyndon B Johnson, John Cusack as Richard Nixon and Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan. This is desperately simplistic stuff, and from a white director would have almost certainly had a whiff of patronisation. From Daniels, it feels more like an awards grab: an attempt to capture the turbulent African-American experience of the 20th century in a soft-focus, marmalade haze, and fit it around a sentimental narrative framework in which the man and his country are formed roughly in tandem, which most cinema-goers will recognise from Forrest Gump. Cecil even peppers his voiceover with Gumpish homilies. The problem is, Daniels doesn't have a great, Tom Hanks-calibre performance to keep you on-side. Instead he has people doing performances of Tom Hanks-calibre performances, whether that's Whitaker's rheumy mumble-and-shuffle routine, or Oprah Winfrey's broad-strokes turn as his admiring but lonely wife Gloria. The Butler is so desperate to leapfrog its way to Oscar-contender status that it never quite manages to entertain or move you in the moment: it's a history lesson with one eye beadily trained on its own future.