Shadrach movie review & film summary (1998)
And he is not arguing that the ancient Shadrach wants to be buried on "Dabney land'' out of nostalgia for plantation days under the slave-owning Dabneys. The old man never really explains his motivation, but we sense it is made of nostalgia for his childhood on the plantation, and a feeling that since he worked this land it is more his own than any other land anywhere else.
Still, "Shadrach'' is another one of those well-meaning films, like "Amistad,'' in which slaves are the supporting characters in their own stories. "Beloved'' brings its characters front and center and focuses on how slavery impacted their lives. It doesn't have much screen time for white people, good or bad. It is inescapable that none of the white characters in "Shadrach'' have the slightest inkling of the reality of the experience that Shadrach and the characters in "Beloved'' endured.
The movie takes place in 1935, in a Virginia deep in the Depression. We meet Paul Whitehurst (Scott Terra), a young boy whose affluent parents are setting out for a funeral. It is a long trip--maybe too long for a young boy. Paul is friendly with some of the children of the Dabney family, poor whites who no longer live in the mansion on the family plantation, but in a sharecropper's cabin. The Dabneys ask Paul to stay with them, and he's delighted at the chance to play with his best friend, Little Mole Dabney (Daniel Treat), and his cheerful sister Edmonia (Monica Bugajski).
The Dabney parents, who are the best-drawn characters in the story, are Trixie (Andie MacDowell) and Vernon (Harvey Keitel). Vernon is a moonshiner, Trixie has a good heart but swigs too much beer, and the Dabney children are raising themselves to be strangers to soap.
Old Shadrach (John Franklin Sawyer) materializes one day. He is so ancient and feeble it hardly seems possible he walked to "Dabney land,'' but he did, and now he sits down and tells the Dabneys he wants to be buried there. When he dies, that sets in motion a subplot about the laws against human burial on private ground, and complications involving the segregated cemeteries in Virginia. The Dabneys solve these problems with a subterfuge that edges perilously close to slapstick, considering the issues being considered here.
