The Butler takes a hard look at the social manners and conventions of western culture, with often bizarre results.  It’s funny, it’s sexy, it’s visually stunning and it’s a bitter satire.  The central character of the butler presides over a dinner party.  He stands apart from the action having seen and heard it all before.  His introductory and closing asides reverberate with literary allusions - drawing on Elliot, Larkin, Shakespeare, Glover, MacNeice, a ragbag of pensees from the heritage of English-speaking civilisation.  Thus he sets the whole event within both a cultural milieu and a bleak universe.

In counterpoint to the butler’s gloom, the dinner party guests are all exuberance.  Brittle as biscuits, they wind every social convention up to the pitch of parody and

beyond.  Their dialogue consists of snippets, expressive of the shallowness of behavior, of the skull beneath the flesh.  Every trivial event - the taking of hats and coats, the saying of grace, the polite chit-chat, the serving of hours-d’oeuvres, expands by natural progression into grotesque and outrageous circus antics.

The resulting action is chaotic and delightful, but underlain with an emptiness that the characters must defy.  Here is the froth and bubble above the dark and the stark.  It’s like nothing seen before but it is instantly recognisable.

YouTube video’s below:

1. •    4 min Trailer
   

2. •    5 min promo below with writer insight below.