Antonia's Line.

Touring the South in 1955, the writer Paul Goodman observed some white children coming out of school. Later, he noted in his journal, "Most of them look like little English farmers crossed with Negro and a dash of Greek Indian: muddy blond hair, sallow skin, flashing black eyes, big square teeth. If the purpose of segregation is to prevent miscegenation, it is a little late. But obviously there is a desperate need to manufacture a distinction, to exteriorize some internal split in the soul."

Near the beginning of A Family Thing, Earl Pilcher (Robert Duvall), as ornery a son of the Old South as you are likely to meet, discovers that he can't "manufacture a distinction" any longer. His deceased mother has left him a letter explaining that she was only his adoptive parent, that his father raped the black housekeeper sixty-odd years ago, that Earl is the issue of that violent union, that he has an elder, entirely black half-brother (the legitimate son of the housekeeper, who died giving birth to Earl), and that her deathbed charge is for Earl to seek out and take care of his other family. Pilcher, a bigot by habit, not principle, and just the sort some of us would dismiss as a redneck, is also--and there's no contradiction here, as the filmmakers wisely realize--an honorable man. So he proceeds to Chicago where his half-brother works as a security guard. It's not just a matter of family obligation: Earl feels discombobulated and is looking for roots now that his old sense of himself has been shattered.

I love this movie but, artistically, it is decidedly a mixed bag. Its one large defect slaps you in the face before the film is twenty minutes old. You realize that Earl is going to march through a series of confrontations with his new kin that will include moments of leashed hostility, guarded tolerance, outright violence (oh yes, the brothers duke it out), crises of conscience, and finally the wholehearted union of the brothers at the grave of their mother. This plot has marching orders and never shows any inclination to be insubordinate.

However, it's only the plot that's stale. The secure direction (by Richard Pearce), the flavorsome dialogue (by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, the same team who wrote the superb One False Move), the choice and use of locations, the photography (by Fred Murphy), the editing, and--above all--the acting of every single role, make this predictable movie not just watchable but stirring, endearing, alive. So there is an aesthetic paradox to A Family Thing. Its overall design seems dictated by the old Hollywood need to make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, by telling 'em exactly what they already know, but each moment that fulfills the design was executed by artists trying to tell the truth as vividly as possible.

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One example: that obligatory fight scene staged and acted by the usual Hollywood mechanics, would have had the brothers pounding away with amplified punches on the soundtrack sounding like fast balls hitting a catcher's mitt. But Pearce and his actors--Duvall and James Earl Jones--knew that these battlers are old, out-of-shape, and really quite reluctant to hurt each other. They end up flat on their backs in a tangle of arms and legs, huffed, chuffed, and preposterous. The scene's hokey melodrama wonderfully modulates into a very human comedy. In fact, the best scenes are the comic ones, especially a great sequence in which the drunken Duvall, trying to wade his way into his new "blackness," cozies up to a black family (complete strangers) celebrating the wife's birthday at a nightspot, buys the table drinks, insists on dancing with the "birthday girl" (a dignified matron), and then proceeds to lecture the astonished group on the evils of quotas. Only the more "serious" moments, like Duvall's discovery of the urban homeless during a nocturnal wander, betray this movie's rather moldy schema.

Irma P. Hall, an old actress new to me, is perfect as a tart-tongued and utterly Christian aunt shared by the brothers. Michael Beach, a young actor familiar to me from his TV work, hits the mark as a resentful nephew. James Earl Jones, who suffered from speech problems in his childhood, gives the tower-of-strength Ray a delicate stammer on the consonant "R" that opens a vista of frailty in this elderly, compassionate Samson.

About Robert Duvall's Earl I would like to fill tomes, but let me only draw attention to the way he reads his late foster mother's letter out loud to his father, the very man that the letter reveals as a rapist. Naturally, Duvall has Earl break down midway. That's practically dictated by the scene as written. But, just before the tears, comes a frightening hiss on an intake of breath which prepares us for, and justifies, the tears. Again, true art mitigates, almost obliterates, cliche. This is Duvall's most fully achieved work since Tender Mercies.

A Family Thing is a pearl enclosed within a plastic oyster. My advice to discriminating moviegoers: if you really want a pearl, it's not hard to pry open plastic.

Touch the base of the back of your neck. Now nod your head a few times. Do you feel the muscles there that gently work each time you nod? These are what you need to exercise before seeing Marleen Gorris's Antonia's Line, the Dutch film that won the Oscar for best foreign language film of 1995. For the only way to enjoy this movie is to keep nodding in approval at, and in agreement with, all--and I do mean all--of the heroine's decisions and all of her daughter's decisions and all of her grand-daughter's decisions (this is a multigenerational saga), and unless those muscles I indicated are in shape, you just might begin to feel a pain in the neck. And if this pain prevents you, even for an instant, from nodding approval, you just might begin to feel your gorge rising at a movie so hermetically sealed in political correctness that your only recourse will be to rent the latest James Bond movie. (And, come to think of it, the heroine of Goldeneye was a lot more convincing as a liberated woman than anyone in Antonia's Line.)

This movie is a feminist pastoral. In the late forties, Antonia, accompanied by her teen-aged daughter, returns to the farmland of her youth after a twenty-year absence to bid good-by--or good riddance--to her dying mother. Once the old lady is buried (not an easy task, since she keeps popping up from her deathbed to croak obscenities and imprecations), Antonia takes over the farm. We might ask why, since she obviously despises most of her neighbors and professes no particular love of the agrarian life. We might also ask: where has she been for the past two decades? What was her life like under the Nazi occupation? Why did she leave the farm in the first place? Why doesn't her daughter, who has artistic ambitions, more strenuously object to living in the sticks? But don't ask. Just keep nodding.

Soon, Antonia's daughter wants a baby. A husband, too? Don't be fatuous. Scarcely blinking, Antonia provides a young stud to function as a human sperm bank. And when the village priest denounces the unwed mother-to-be, Antonia entraps the priest in a sexual act and blackmails him into speaking more charitably in the pulpit Sunday morning. What's that you say? Qualms about a woman who uses a young girl as sexual bait? And to gain what? Good words from a priest whose religion Antonia doesn't believe in? (And why does Antonia go to Mass every Sunday though she states unambiguously that she is an atheist?) Good will from a congregation whose members Antonia apparently has little to do with? But don't ask. Just keep nodding.

Suffice it to say that the absurdities are multiplied as "time flows, as season follows season" (yes, the narration is full of folksy fakery of that order). The film, though crisply put together, has no particular style, since its fantastical flourishes are all borrowed from Fellini's Amarcord and certain Latin American novels of the "magic realism" school. Worst of all, Gooris never asks for a complex response from her audience. Could the priest have perhaps an atom of real piety in his sanctimonious nature? Of course not! He's a fraud who can only attain a certain goofy humanity by shedding his cassock and fathering twelve children upon a human baby-making machine. When Antonia's granddaughter who (natch) is a genious in both music and mathematics, incites a student walkout on a professor who dares to criticize her for handing in a five-page paper when he wanted two, we aren't permitted by the staging of the scene to wonder if the teacher might have a valid complaint (isn't conciseness considered a definite virtue in higher mathematics?), but must consider him a bigoted numskull for not conceding the unquestionable genius of the girl. If there is such a thing as dramaturgical bigotry, this movie has it, in spades.