Having read John Lewis's book, "Walking with the Wind," and reading first-hand accounts of the ordeals young blacks experienced at the beginning and throughout the Civil Rights movement, I'd have to say that "The Butler" got most of that stuff right. The juxtaposition of newsreel footage with actors was very well done.

Whittaker and Winfrey were both outstanding, but I felt the film had a very serious flaw that truly annoyed me: each and every actor in the "parade of presidents" looked absolutely nothing like the president he was portraying. Robin Williams as Eisenhower? John Cusack as Nixon? James Marsden as JFK? Liev Schreiber as Johnson? Alan Rickman as Reagan, and worse, Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan? It was downright cartoonish, and while it didn't thoroughly spoil the film, it took away from the overall quality. Also, none of the actors portraying black leaders at the time (Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael) looked anything like the people they were portraying either. Surprisingly though, the two extras as Haldeman and Erlichman looked so much like the people they were portraying that the effect was downright uncanny.