Like Forrest Gump before it, The Butler depicts the view from one man’s front row ticket to life in 20^th century America. The movie—out today in Australian cinemas—is narrated by Cecil Gaines, born on a cotton plantation in the segregated south, as he overcomes great poverty and suffering to become a butler in the White House.

The Butler, Cecil Gaines, played by Forest Whittaker.

In many ways, The Butler covers well trodden Hollywood ground—giving an overview rather than an in-depth look at some of the key moments of the civil rights movement: the Greensboro sit-ins, the Freedom Riders, the rise of violence by the Ku Klux Klan, the civil rights marches, the introduction of the Civil Rights Act, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the rise of the Black Power movement, including the beginning of the Black Panther Party, right up to the inauguration of America’s first African American President, Barack Obama.

But the narrative is not so much about those well-known events, as it is about a black American family struggling through an era where the commonly held belief is that not all men and women are created equal.

Cecil Gaines story begins on a cotton farm. He watches as his mother is submissively led off to a shed to be raped by the white plantation owner’s son, and challenges his father to do something about it. When his father speaks up, he is shot in the head in front of Cecil. So begins a lifetime of caution for Cecil, who has seen the consequences of challenging authority as a black man. Cecil is taken in by the plantation owners to learn to become a ‘house nigger’, a domestic servant. As he grows up, his career follows, as he moves up the ranks to become a butler at the White House, during the Truman administration and then for seven more presidents including Eisenhower, Johnson, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan (the Carter and Ford administrations were mainly skipped over). Cecil now has sons of his own, one of whom is determined to fight in the civil rights movement, and finds himself a part of almost every major civil rights milestone.

In 1994 when Forrest Gump was released, Rolling Stone magazine held up the film as one that, at its heart, was about hope. “There is something of Forrest that [director] Zemeckis would like to see rub off on us: his capacity for hope.”

In The Butler, Gaines is no Forrest Gump, even if he is played by a Forest (Forest Whittaker, of ‘King of Scotland’ fame, that is). He is not naïve, and his understanding of the consequences of speaking out shadow his life. He has hope in the presidents he serves who he believes, from what little he hears of conversations in powerful rooms, are the best people to affect change. But time goes on, and there’s only so much that men in suits in rooms without corners can do. And it’s not the Butler’s employer who provides the real hope for America’s black population. It’s his son, and others like him, whom Gaines shuns for much of the movie’s duration.

The ensemble cast, which includes Oprah Winfrey, John Cusack, Cuba Gooding Jr, Alan Rickman and Robin Williams, can be distracting, and doesn’t do much to allay the feeling that this movie tries to do too much with a theme that could have been much more hard-hitting. But it’s still emotional, even if manipulatively so, and worth a look because of the importance of its subject matter.

For a movie about the civil rights movement in America, the application to life outside that time and place is everywhere. Gaines says America is good at ignoring what’s happened “right under our noses”, paying more attention to overseas atrocities than those committed on our own soil. Can the same be said of Australia? Absolutely.