Word: aunts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...someone showed up at a family wedding in one of the outfits I saw at the Chandler Pavilion the other night, he'd be taken aside by his Aunt Ida and lectured about showing some respect. Yet these outfits were put together by professionals. I read in the paper that big-name designers of tuxedos compete furiously for the privilege of dressing the stars in attendance...
...birth killed her is not in his heart. Ray has hidden his long-denied anger beneath a smoothly affable manner. Earl is hiding his more recent astonishment under stony taciturnity. But big-city circumstances force him to take refuge in Ray's home, where his blind, wise, straight-talking aunt (Irma P. Hall) maneuvers the brothers toward reconciliation...
...film is well acted, and Duvall and Jones generate some genuine, tastefully understated chemistry without slipping into sloppy sentiment. Another plus is Irma Hall, who is wonderfully enjoyable as the testy, domineering, but open-minded and warmhearted Aunt T., the sister of Earl and Ray's dead mother. But "A Family Thing" stumbles in its attempt to bring other, cliched themes and subplots into play. Earl's first few days in Chicago, including his night of drunken wandering, are a tired variation on "hillbilly enters the big city," with a few half-hearted efforts at humor and some moments...
...wants to get to know this brother he has never known. Ray's conversion is the true struggle: though outwardly courteous, he holds on to his resentment and his hatred to the very end. An undercurrent of tension therefore remains up to the day of Earl's departure, when Aunt T. shares a secret with them both that dissolves the final barrier between them and binds them together for good...
...this intended moment of epiphany somehow falls flat, spoiled by Aunt T.'s inappropriate exclamation "You were as white as an angel!" In general, the women in "A Family Thing"--Aunt T., Mrs. Pilcher, Ray's and Earl's mother--are too saintly to be true, while the men are either churls (like Pilcher, Sr.) or burdened by a huge chip on the shoulder. Like balky horses, they must be forced into decent, sensible behavior by their womenfolk. "A Family Thing" would probably have been more convincing had nobility and selfishness been more evenly divided between the two sexes...