A FAMILY THING
A film review by John Schuurman
Copyright 1996 John Schuurman
Alright, there is one mighty stretch of credulity that we viewers must make if we are to become fully engaged with this movie. The film asks a lot in this one regard but once the concession is made we are pleased we have made it and congratulations are in order. If we can do this -- suspend our native skepticism -- this fine film and America's two best actors take over and provide a wonderful encounter with that which is best in the human condition.
OK, here is what you have to get around: Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones as biological half-brothers. Of course, not in a million years. So we all agree. But then we can get back to the movie.
The story takes place in modern day America. It is a simple story and one gives nothing away by telling some of it. Earl Pilcher (Duvall) a deeply Southern man from a thoroughly Southern place learns that though he was brought up white and though he looks white and acts white, he is in fact half black. It seems that his biological father forced sexual relations on a black woman who worked for the family. The woman became pregnant and died while giving birth to little Earl. The child is light skinned and is then brought up in his father's home under the ruse of being the natural son of two white parents.
The movie begins with Earl being told the truth about his origins and composition. He is also made aware that there is a brother, a half-brother named Ray Murdock (Jones), a policeman who lives in Chicago. The rest of the film is a dance between these two -- a sometimes painful, often angry, deeply touching, frequently humorous dance -- through the minefield of contemporary race relations.
The partners, Earl and Ray, move across the screen toward each other. Carrying all the baggage of their respective cultures, they are wary and suspicious, even hateful at the outset. But the music of -- biology? duty? decency? -- slowly draws them towards one another and they become friends and at the end of the dance, we think they find the special love *phileo* of brothers.
Assisting them, (and arguably the music personified), is blind Aunt T. in an inspired performance by Chicago stage actress Irma P. Hall. Go see this movie just for Aunt T. She steals the show. Since she can't see, she tells us that she no longer "has the benefit of being able to judge between people on the way they look." But blind Aunt T. is the catalyst that brings the best out of her two reluctant dancers.
As I watched, I was at once frightened and hopeful for the rest of us. If a suspension of disbelief is necessary to view Duvall and Jones as half-brothers, no such act is asked of us to believe that we are in a terrible and frightening crisis of racism in America. Self-evident though that is, this film made my heart quake over the vastness of the gulf between cultures.
And yet, here we saw one relationship in which healing occured. It was just one, (and the movie is not silly or so naive as to suggest that something so vast and unwieldly as the contemporary racial gulf is fixable), but it was one sign that there IS something better than racial divide. Such relationships can happen and as a sign, this was for the moment -- enough.
John Schuurman
for more reviews by John see: http://www.mcs.com/~sjvogel/wcrc/movies.html
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