ODD COUPLE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

NOT SINCE IN THE HEAT OF THE Night has a good ole cracker had a culture shock like the one Earl Pilcher Jr. (Robert Duvall) receives in A Family Thing. It comes in the form of a deathbed letter from the woman he has always believed was his mother. In it she tells him that though he looks, acts and thinks white, he is half black, the product of a union six decades ago between his father and the family's African-American maid, who died giving birth to him. His adoptive mother's last wish is that he find his black half brother and make peace with him.

The finding is relatively easy; Ray Murdock (James Earl Jones) is a policeman in Chicago. Making peace is another matter; Ray knows how his mother died, was in fact present on that terrible night. Forgiving the white man who seduced her and the half brother whose breech birth killed her is not in his heart. Ray has hidden his long-denied anger beneath a smoothly affable manner. Earl is hiding his more recent astonishment under stony taciturnity. But big-city circumstances force him to take refuge in Ray's home, where his blind, wise, straight-talking aunt (Irma P. Hall) maneuvers the brothers toward reconciliation.

There is delicacy and restraint in all these performances as they ease a far-fetched premise toward believability under Richard Pearce's clear, cool direction. The script by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson is obviously a fairy-tale, but the unsentimental realism of its telling, combined with our profound need to believe in it just now, turns A Family Thing into a curiously affecting little movie.

--By Richard Schickel