A Family Thing
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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The little I’d heard about A Family Thing in advance made me curious but skeptical. It sounds awfully contrived: Earl Pilcher Jr., a man in his 60s from small-town Arkansas who sells and rents tractors (Robert Duvall), discovers after the death of the woman he believed was his mother that his real mother was a black maid who worked for his family and died in a shack giving birth to him.
In one sense, this seemingly melodramatic plot premise is contrived, registering more as myth than as real possibility. Yet thanks to what the movie has in mind and especially what the actors bring to it, it’s a lovely myth, one that has the ring of deeply felt truth. The story is a specifically southern myth–both screenwriters, Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, who also wrote One False Move, hail from Arkansas–founded on the everyday intimacy among black and white people in the deep south that persists in spite of all the taboos against recognizing and acknowledging it. The movie chronicles the working out of that recognition and acknowledgment as it takes shape between a few individuals over a few days, and for this reason the plot premise becomes a fully functional contrivance rather than a gimmick exploited for shock effect. In other words, the situation that gives rise to this drama is exceptional, but the experience underlying it is universal–an experience that everyone working on the movie appears to understand. It’s an experience that tells us we’re all much more related to one another than we’re usually ready to admit.
The same can’t be said of James Earl Jones, whose major accomplishment is to make Ray Murdock the individual triumph over type. (If Ray’s deep-bellied laughter at times suggests a cliche, the quirky placement of his laughter within scenes and the even more unpredictable occurrences of his stutter conjure up the complexities of a living, breathing individual–an astonishing piece of work. And when it comes to Irma P. Hall as Aunt T.–a loving curmudgeon and fussbudget who functions as the prime mover in the coming together of Earl and Ray–type and individual seem to arm-wrestle each other to an eloquent standstill.
