Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 5, 1993 TAG: 9309020323
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Tom Shales
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Technically this is the story of the Arnetts, a middle-class black family living in Minneapolis-St. Paul. But ``Laurel Avenue'' is also the story of all families everywhere - ties that bind and schisms that threaten. The good and bad that happens to the Arnetts is very much of our time, yet the crises don't seem mere topical cliches; you'll believe they're happening to this family because you know they're happening to others.
The story unfolds almost in ``real time,'' opening on a Friday afternoon and ending early the following Monday morning. Here is some of what happens to the Arnetts:
Daughter Rolanda (Rhonda Stubbins White), who has a recurring cocaine problem, starts the weekend out badly, letting a drug-dealing former boyfriend into her apartment. They argue, he hits her in the face, and the bruise she gets is so unsightly it may keep her from a job interview scheduled for the next afternoon.
Yolanda (Juanita Jennings), Rolanda's married twin sister, is about to be promoted to sergeant on the police force when, during a drug bust, she notices that one of the suspects fleeing in the distance is her sister's teen-age son Rushan (Vonte Sweet).
Son Marcus (Monte Russell), who runs a men's clothing store, is encouraged by a conniving friend named Anthony (Gary Dourdan) to join him in a money-making scheme involving stolen steroids.
Son Keith (Scott Lawrence), a high-school basketball coach, listens to a white player's complaint that he's been excluded from the team's starting lineup because of his race, even while one of the star black players has been costing the team points by screwing up.
That faltering player, a 17-year-old named Fletcher (Ulysses Zachary), is not a member of the Arnett family but is dating one of the Arnett girls. He has arrived at a pivotal moment in his life when it seems all his dreams - a scholarship, college, success - are shattering. Fletcher's story, and Zachary's performance, are among the most moving of all those featured.
The matriarch and patriarch, Maggie and Jake (Mary Alice and Mel Winkler), live in a very lived-in old house on Laurel Avenue and try to keep mishaps from turning into disasters. They also, refreshingly, insist on their offspring joining them in church on Sunday morning. Very rarely does television portray families to whom religion is important. It's another way in which this program departs radically from TV's usual domestic banality.
As you wouldn't expect to find a series this intimately affecting on the broadcast networks, you wouldn't expect to find it on HBO, either. HBO prefers projects that are, for the most part, flashier and trashier, or else big thudding historical clunkers like ``Stalin'' and ``Citizen Cohn.'' At this point, we don't know if we'll see more of the Arnetts or not; like the other networks would do, HBO will wait for the ratings before underwriting more episodes.
Much more is going on here than melodrama, and ``Laurel Avenue'' is about much more than the Arnetts. It's about the practical limits of good intentions, the ways people fail those they love, the promises we all make and break to ourselves and one another, the obstacles that arise just when other obstacles have been vanquished.
``Laurel Avenue'' is not, for the most part, about ``race relations''; Yolanda's husband is white, but little is made of that. The film deals with the ways we are all alike, not the ways we differ. There's joy in it, too, and hope, but as Rolanda observes on the topic of life, ``Damn, it never gets any easier.''
For executive producer Paul Aaron (who has a brief cameo as a disgruntled bookstore customer), coproducer Charles S. Dutton (star of Fox's ``Roc''), writer Michel Henry Brown and director Carl Franklin, ``Laurel Avenue'' is a golden moment - a production loaded with talent and a drama loaded with life.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB