What a pleasant surprise this was. I caught this one day on Showtime and really didn't give it much of a chance. But I was so wrong!! Powerful performance by Irma P. Hall (as Aunt T.), and Robert Duvall is at his best as well. Wonderfully acted and written, this has to be the best movie I have seen in a long while. Sure, the same old southern stereotypes are portrayed as well as the same for the inner-city black culture, with many being quite accurate. Some parts were a little over the top, like the birthday party in the bar that Earl crashes as a total stranger. But that being said, not a lot of negatives I can say about this movie.

Any movie about racial matters is bound to be difficult to tackle by anyone with scruples and integrity. For those who can deftly deal with the issue and make a quality movie: my hat's off to them. "A Family Thing" is a quality movie.

Earl Pilcher, Jr. (Robert Duvall), an old white Arkansan finds out that his real mother was not the old white woman who raised him and who just passed away, but a Black woman his father had an illicit relationship with. This news rocked his genteel Southern world. He grew up a proud white Southern man who referred to Blacks as N-words. Now he has to confront the fact that A.) his father was a philanderer and B.) he was half Black. He now wanted to find his real brother, Ray Murdock (James Earl Jones), thereby fulfilling his adopted mother's wish and satisfying his own curiosity

It wasn't a felicitous reunion between the two of them. There was some serious bitterness: Earl because he had to face the fact he wasn't white (or at least all white) and Ray because he saw Earl's father as the cause of his mother's death.

This was a well written and finely acted drama. Billy Bob Thornton's first screenplay, "One False Move," was a good debut. "A Family Thing" is even better.

What a great film! Robert and James Earl Jones were terrific. You believe everything in this film. The characters draw you right to them and you don't want the film to end.