By Noel Murray and Jim Ridley

The final image of Richard Pearce’s feel-good comedy-drama A Family Thing is of a train—which is none too surprising, since trains wind their way through the whole film. Freight cars roll through Arkansas, where the movie begins and ends; elevated trains crisscross Chicago, where most of the story takes place. Pick a scene at random and odds are there’s a train somewhere nearby, chugging past the shot or clattering under the dialogue.

The train is a useful symbol: it suggests both the two sides of the tracks where A Family Thing’s characters reside, and the rails that link them. And director Pearce rides his symbolic railroad for all it’s worth, searching out every hub and connection to bring his movie home. The hard work is appreciated: it’s what moves A Family Thing beyond mere heartwarming Americana and makes it an engaging, often moving examination of the meaning of family.

Robert Duvall stars in A Family Thing as Earl Pilcher, an Arkansas farm equipment store owner who is startled to learn, upon his Momma’s death, that he is actually the product of a rough sexual encounter between his father and their black housekeeper, who died giving birth to Earl. As a fulfillment of his Momma’s dying wish, Earl travels to Chicago to meet his half-brother Raymond (played by James Earl Jones)—only to find that Raymond, who has long known and resented the family secret, has no interest in remembering the pain and heartbreak of his Arkansas boyhood.

It’s expected that Earl and Ray will eventually reconcile, and of course they do. Before that happens, though, they engage in a lengthy period of cautious, aimless chitchat, in which the two men find they have more in common than the train tracks that run past their homes. Both men served in Korea; both men returned from the war and settled down to a life of hard work, churchgoing, family life and more than a little disappointment. In many ways, their lives have been running parallel. Although neither man immediately trusts the other, they gradually come to realize that in this world, the more people you have by your side, the better off you are.

Both Duvall and Jones are predictably fine in this movie: the two veteran actors are among that select group of stars who simply inhabit the screen. Jones plays Ray as a tired old man with a strong sense of irony, who smiles easily and swallows his ancient rage. Duvall’s Earl is even more complex, a seething Southern man so steeped in prejudice that when he finds out he’s half-black he can only stare at himself in the mirror and hiss “nigger.”

As good as the two actors are, though, they are eclipsed by D.C.-area stage actress Irma P. Hall, who plays the half-brothers’ wise old blind Aunt T. Although the narrative device of an aging blind person is usually pretty hackneyed (she can’t see color, but she can see people—get it?), Hall gives the character vigor, waddling through scenes and forcibly shoving people together to talk, rather than trying to subtly trick them into communicating. Hall’s Aunt T. is above all a good neighbor: one gets the feeling that she would let Earl stay in her home even if he weren’t blood. Whenever Hall appears on-screen, the movie noticeably brightens.

Of course, the actors are not working in a vacuum. Director Pearce (whose previous efforts include the interesting Heartland and Leap of Faith, as well as the godawful No Mercy) keeps the story moving with quiet grace and trains aplenty. And the real star of the show is the screenplay by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson (One False Move), which crackles with sharp dialogue and keen observation. From the strained relationship among Ray’s son’s family (which further illustrates the tumultuous nature of families) to the fate of Earl’s stolen pick-up truck (which is initially used as a plot device to keep Earl in Chicago, but turns into a tiny representation of how one’s life can inadvertently, even curiously, touch another’s), Thornton and Epperson never let the storytelling get flabby.

Well-meaning pictures like A Family Thing usually tend towards broad caricatures and big speeches, but Thornton and Epperson are better than that. Their characters tell stories, and speak plainly about how they feel. Best of all, the movie doesn’t play Earl’s innate prejudice for cheap payoffs. Thornton, a Southerner, is smart enough to know that modern bigots rarely wear their racism on their sleeve; they have friendly relationships with specific African-Americans, but are quietly distrustful and disparaging to African-Americans in general. Earl is a well-rounded character, bitter about his situation but trying to muddle through it and do the right thing.

Thornton and Epperson’s sharp sense of observation blesses A Family Thing, but it also highlights the film’s great weakness: it’s too safe by half. The film ends just as Ray and Earl return to Arkansas to meet the rest of the family, and so we are spared the tense scenes of polite conversation and private anger that the screenwriters could likely have written splendidly. Unfortunately, those scenes would also likely have made white audiences uncomfortable, and the trend in Hollywood is away from such confrontation. (Witness the recent Academy Awards telecast, which was noteworthy for its lack of controversy—virtually no mention was made of Jesse Jackson’s somewhat justified protest over the lack of black nominees, and the Academy had to roll out Christopher Reeve to honor the kind of socially conscious films that were absent from the year’s Best Picture category.)

Perhaps it’s unfair to criticize a film for not going where it never promised to go, but A Family Thing is so well-written that the prospect of the stops it didn’t make are too tantalizing to ignore. Instead, the train that is A Family Thing rushes on by, leaving behind only echoes—which admittedly, more often than not, linger in the ear and in the mind. —Noel Murray

Savage Inequalities

For a white Southern kid who grew up after the mid-1960’s triumphs of the civil-rights movement, the concept of a world cleaved by segregation was always hard to fathom—maybe on purpose. Who’s to say I wouldn’t have been among those sitting at the all-white lunch counters, guiltily offering my tacit approval? Who’s to say I’d have felt guilty? For that reason, I always feel a kind of complacent relief whenever I see a movie that depicts extreme racist violence. It’s far easier for me to believe I wouldn’t participate in a lynching or a beating than a quiet exclusionary lunch among people of my own color and culture—even though the underlying principle is no less evil.

That’s why the new film Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored strikes me as much more powerful than a shrieking melodrama like Mississippi Burning: the movie’s matter-of-fact handling of daily life in the segregated South doesn’t allow a retreat to a safe moral distance. Based on the autobiographical novel by Clifton Taulbert, Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored depicts Taulbert’s childhood in postwar Mississippi, from the blacks-only schools and churches that anchored his community to the cotton fields he worked when he was barely old enough to dress himself.

The director, Tim Reid, an immensely likable actor best known as dee-jay Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati, doesn’t hype up the material—and in all honesty, some of the slack TV-style dramaturgy could use tightening. But the movie’s unwavering gaze and steady pace have their own integrity. Reid conveys the weight of a lifetime of petty indignities through countless well-chosen details—the feeling of not being allowed to use the restroom at a gas station that just accepted your money, or the way his characters’ voices and posture automatically change in the presence of white people. Although the movie treats segregation as merely another fact of Clifton’s life, the accumulation of detail gives a real sense of the way the separation altered even the most basic aspects of living.

Reid’s understatement pays off especially in one quietly devastating scene, in which Clifton’s great-grandfather, Poppa (Al Freeman Jr.), teaches the child his first letters of the alphabet: a “w” for white, and a “c” for colored. When Clifton uses the corresponding public water fountain, Poppa smiles and says, “You’re learning.” It’s the most mirthless smile you’ve ever seen. That one moment alone speaks volumes about the insidious effects of institutional racism and the soul-killing burden of “getting along.”

And yet the movie is filled with joy, and romance, and the kind of humor derived from bitter experience that sustains people through hard times. Reid is admirably particular about what people do when they’re together, whether it’s eating, listening to the radio or trying on clothes. As a result, the movie captures a rare feeling of community, as well as the impression of a world that continues to exist when the camera isn’t running.

This is as much the accomplishment of the actors as the director. From the leading roles all the way down to the many brief supporting parts, the actors perform with passion and obvious pride. In some cases, familiar actors surprise us with new facets of their talent: the warmth Richard Roundtree displays as the iceman Cleve, one of Clifton’s many strong father figures, or the sly good humor and rolling cadences of Isaac Hayes’ preacher. (We see how wasted these actors have been in one-dimensional blaxploitation roles.) In the case of that great, fierce actor Al Freeman Jr., he’s so superb we can only wonder why he isn’t a household name: with his falcon’s eyes, sage countenance and serene strength, he embodies unbroken dignity. The rest of the large cast, from Phylicia Rashad as Clifton’s Ma Ponk to Leon as an emigrant who returns from the North, is very nearly as good.

Director Reid struggled for five years to get Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored off the ground; the movie was finally produced by an independent, BET Pictures, the filmmaking arm of Black Entertainment Television. Despite minimal advertising and a limited release, word of mouth is building an audience for the film city by city, and it stands to make a small profit. But the major studios would rather risk losing $100 million on a single bomb like Cutthroat Island, whose losses alone could’ve financed both Reid’s film and Spike Lee’s long-delayed Jackie Robinson biopic with $70 million to spare, than greenlight a few risky, relatively inexpensive projects by African-American filmmakers. That’s a form of artistic segregation in itself—a separate and unequal apportioning of resources. Nevertheless, Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored is a genuine rarity among movies about racial and social issues: a labor of love that isn’t laborious. —Jim Ridley

Director Reid struggled for five years to get Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored off the ground; the movie was finally produced by an independent, BET Pictures, the filmmaking arm of Black Entertainment Television. Despite minimal advertising and a limited release, word of mouth is building an audience for the film city by city, and it stands to make a small profit. But the major studios would rather risk losing $100 million on a single bomb like Cutthroat Island, whose losses alone could’ve financed both Reid’s film and Spike Lee’s long-delayed Jackie Robinson biopic with $70 million to spare, than greenlight a few risky, relatively inexpensive projects by African-American filmmakers. That’s a form of artistic segregation in itself—a separate and unequal apportioning of resources. Nevertheless, Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored is a genuine rarity among movies about racial and social issues: a labor of love that isn’t laborious. —Jim Ridley