Lee Daniels’ The Butler continues to prove a major success with critics and audiences, but a few of President Ronald Reagan’s supporters have slammed the film for historical inaccuracies. Leading the pack lately is the late POTUS’ own son, Michael Reagan.
Though Lee Daniels’ The Butler has won two straight weekend at the box office, Ronald Reagan’s depiction (by an otherwise affable Alan Rickman ) has received non-stop criticism from conservative websites.
A few days ago, Michael Reagan penned a column for Newsmax titled “The Butler from Another Planet,” which was circulated by dozens of conservative websites and resulted in a massive backlash. So what does the film do that is so incendiary?
Critics say it implies racism on the part of Ronald Reagan during his presidency, something that his sons and Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese III , categorically reject.
“You’ve taken a great story about a real person and real events and twisted it into a bunch of lies,” wrote Michael Reagan.
He draws several parallels between Forest Whitaker’s “butler” and the real-life figure who inspired him, Eugene Allen. Reagan suggests that the film takes many liberties with the butler’s past and exaggerates some of the racial themes.
“The real story of the White House butler doesn’t imply racism at all. It’s simply Hollywood liberals wanting to believe something about my father that was never there,” Michael Reagan writes.
“Despite what Hollywood’s liberal hacks believe, my father didn’t see people in colors. He saw them as individual Americans. If the liberals in Hollywood — and Washington — ever start looking at people the way he did, the country will be a lot better off.”
You can check out Michael Reagan’s column on historical inaccuracy in Lee Daniels’ The Butler here .
