Movie Review

Directed by Susanna Styron, starring: Harvey Keitel (Shug Dabney), Andie MacDowell (Trixie Dabney), John Franklin Sawyer (Shadrach), John Terra (Paul), Narrator: Martin Sheen, VHS, PG, 88 minutes, 1998.

This is a funny and heartwarming story with a PG rating because of lots of profanity. Styron directs her first movie based on a short story by her father William. There are several suspensions of disbelief necessary to enjoy the movie not the least of which is watching the elegant MacDowell play a slatternly, beer swilling southern woman.

The story takes place in Virginia during The Great Depression. Paul's family is well off Southern Gentry but his best friend Mole Dabney is part of a poor family on the other side of town. They don't bathe much and the boys all suffer from B.O. but the girls smell sweet especially Molina. The Dabney Family is Old Virginia but has fallen on hard times and Shug makes a slim living manufacturing moonshine on the old family farm. Paul gets to stay with his best friend Little Mole Dabney when his parents suddenly have to go to Baltimore for a family funeral. Into this unusual setting walks Shadrach, a 99 year old black man who has walked from Alabama, over 600 miles, in order to be buried on the old Dabney property where he had been a slave before being sold to a land owner in Alabama. This is first of all a story of charity and kindness to strangers, a point emphasized through sermon and conversation in case you don't get it from the story.

The Dabneys and Paul all set out to return to the family farm, the place where Shadrach is to be buried amongst his ancestors. Shadrach, alas, doesn't die right away and his lingering becomes an occasion for the children to learn of life and death and the care of the helpless old man in their midst. However, it doesn't prove to be that easy to accede to Shadrach's request. The county sheriff comes by to inform them that they can't bury a coloured man on the old farm because it's against the law. No, it's not racism it's new Commonwealth of Virginia law that burials cannot take place on private property. It must be done by a qualified coloured undertaker and done in a coloured church! It might cost as much as $35., a sum far beyond the means of the Dabney family.

Shug sets out to arrange a deal with the local funeral home, a deal that involves the exchange of a goodly amount of moonshine for services rendered. As it turns out there is also a little bait and switch that occurs both to satisfy and fool the sheriff.

In response to the children's fears about death Shug says "Death ain't nothin'to be afeared about. It's LIFE is where you got to be terrified".

The children discuss whether Shadrach goes to the same heaven they do. "There's coloured churches and coloured toilets…", says Molina. Paul says "My mother's very religious and she says God loves all His children." Reflecting on his mother's own death two years later Paul recounts that Shadrach's peaceful passing did not prepare him for her pain and suffering. He remembers with approval, Shug's words "Death ain't much.", echoes of St Paul's "Death, where is thy sting?" and this minimal restatement of Pauline theology seems to be Shug's wisest and enduring legacy, remembered in the expletives and profanity that peppers his speech. Once you get used to it the profanity plays an interesting counterpoint to the kind and caring behaviour of someone we would expect to be a racist southern "cracker". In Martin Luther King's 1963 "I have a dream…" speech he said "…I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slave owners and the sons of former slaves will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood…" The movie functions as a parable. In parable, two impossible things are put together and as they bump past each other like plates of the earth's crust, a moment for surprise and insight is created. "Cracker" and "kindness to a coloured man" go about as well together as 'Samaritan' and 'neighbour'. Jesus didn't say "willing suspension of disbelief" but he knew what he was talking about.

This movie will bring a smile to your lips, a tear to your eye and perhaps a moment of sharp insight.