RIP James Earl Jones

It was, and is, my intention to fill this blog with a very specific kind of content. I want to write about movies, mostly older movies, after seeing them for the first time. It's true that my first post already technically broke that rule. I had seen Hans Christian Andersen, but it was so long ago I only had the vaguest impressions of memories of it. It was effectively new to me.

A Family Thing (1996)

For this third post, I'm breaking the rule completely. We've lost a great talent today in James Earl Jones. When I saw the news this morning, I knew I wanted to write a post about him. I considered trying to find a movie he was in that I haven't seen, but a review of his filmography didn't yield any obvious choices. As I thought about how best to pay tribute to Jones, I kept coming back to one movie: A Family Thing.

All of the news articles about Jones' death will mention his work as Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, his role as Mufasa in Disney's The Lion King, perhaps his recurring role in the Jack Ryan movies of the 1990s. Few, if any of them will mention A Family Thing, a quiet family drama written by Billy Bob Thornton and directed by Richard Pearce in 1996. I certainly don't mean to minimize the importance of those better-known roles. Jones' voice was a powerful thing. But a movie like A Family Thing shows that James Earl Jones was much more than just his voice.

The movie is about a Southern white man, played by Robert Duvall, who discovers that he is actually half-black and has a black half-brother, played by James Earl Jones. He drives from his home in Arkansas to Chicago to meet his brother. Though the ensuing progression through a rocky start to grudging acceptance and finally a relationship approaching brotherhood, might seem predictable and formulaic, there are some truly touching and illuminating moments along the way.

Those moments come in large part due to Jones' performance as Ray, a widower cop with a stutter. Ray knows who Duvall's Earl is as soon as he introduces himself. He knows that Earl's father had raped his mother, who died giving birth to Earl. It might be fair to say that the film pulls its punches in some ways with regard to such a painful subject. But I find Jones' understated performance to be more genuinely human than a more melodramatic performance might have been.

As much as I love Jones' performance in this film (in which he uses his actual stutter), it must be acknowledged that Irma P. Hall as Aunt T, the brothers' shared aunt, steals every scene she's in. She delivers comic and dramatic lines with equal authority as she helps the brothers come to terms with their new reality.

James Earl Jones turned in memorable performances in many films and television shows, spanning decades and in many genres. (He had a hilarious guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory not that long ago.) As much as I love Star Wars (and I do, believe me) it's this very human character that he played in A Family Thing that I will think of most often as I remember the great James Earl Jones.