Good Fences (TV Movie 2003)

Good Fences: Directed by Ernest R. Dickerson. With Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Zachary Simmons Glover, Mo’Nique. Good Fences is about an upwardly mobile black family for whom the American dream becomes a nightmare. Set in the 1970s, Tom Spader is an attorney who is determined to end what he has dubbed “the colored man’s losing streak.” When his winning of a high-profile case thrusts him into the limelight, he decides to move his wife and their two kids out of their mixed lower-middle-class town and into the posh enclave of Greenwich, Connecticut.

“Rarely have so many talented people worked together to make movie that is such a mess. Everyone associated with Good Fences — not just Glover and Goldberg, but also director Dickerson and screenwriter Ellis — has done much better work in the past, and will do better work again in the future. But this pudding has no theme, as Churchill said. It is neither comedy nor drama, neither funny nor moving. If it has any message, it is that all white people are foolish and that black people are racially inauthentic if they value success, accomplishment, wealth, or even suburban comfort. The movie seems to agree with the character in the Robert Frost poem (u0026quot;Mending Wallu0026quot;) that u0026quot;good fences make good neighborsu0026quot;; its tone argues that integration was a failure, and that blacks should stick to neckbones and avoid brie. But the narrator of Frostu0026#39;s poem is wiser, and says, u0026quot;Something there is that doesnu0026#39;t love a wall, That wants it down.u0026quot;”