Essentially a two-character piece -- a crotchety old Southern Jewess and her amiable black chauffeur -- based on a Pulitzer Prized play of typically slight distinction, cozy, comforting, demographically made-to-order for the upper-middle-class middlebrow Broadway theatergoer. Despite the efforts of Bruce Beresford (the Australian director on an extended Southern sabbatical: Tender Mercies, Crimes of the Heart) to turn them into Instant Faded Memories, with his distant camera set-ups and blanching light and dusty atmosphere, the characters insist on coming vibrantly to life. The actors, more exactly, insist on bringing them there. Jessica Tandy need be credited with little more than refraining from slurping on a temptingly juicy part. Morgan Freeman, meanwhile, must be credited with something more difficult: playing what some people could label an Uncle Tom type, and playing it without caricature or condescension (we've seen Richard Pryor do the comic version of this, or something like it, in concert), working it out beautifully and respectfully to the tiniest detail. Not the tiniest, but one of the most beautiful and respectful: the tic-like puckering of his lips as the least little giveaway of habitually suppressed humor, intelligence, inner life. It would be no more than strictly accurate to call this performance monumental. With Dan Aykroyd and Esther Rolle. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
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