Product Description

Good Fences reunites Goldberg and Glover for the first time since their now classic pairing in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple in 1985. This is a story of an upwardly mobile yet dysfunctional black family who find themselves standing at the lily- white gates of the American Dream. They come to discover that nothing in life is just black and white and that the road to a better life may just be another path of struggle and survival.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19548 in DVD
• Brand: Paramount
• Released on: 2003-12-16
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 119 minutes

Customer Reviews

check it out
First let me state that despite the back of case description this movie is not a comedy. It does have its funny moments but comedy it is not. Set mainly in the 70's, this is the story of the Spaders, a black family that's movin on up. The father, aptly named Tom, is a promising lawyer who is driven to prove that he and his family are every bit as good, if not better than white people. As they get richer, and move into, and up in the affluent white world, they gradually become that which they hated, vapid, spoiled, stuck up bigots. The only family member who seems mainly unaffected is the son, Tommy 2. The film is sad, moving and disturbing. The direction is superb and the actors give powerful performances, with Whoopie Goldberg really standing out with her portrayal of a housewife increasingly trapped, isolated and alienated in a world in which she both belongs and dosn't belong.

A Serious Drama!
First of all I would like to say that this movie is not funny or meant to be funny as one customer stated in their review. I don't want viewers to get confused and miss out on a serious drama portrayed quite well by Glover and Goldberg. I have seen this movie a few times, and I myself never even thought about the roles they played in The Color Purple, which incidently was also a serious drama. For anyone to think otherwise, they simply have a closed mind, and really missed the point. This is a "must see". A story that is very common, because so many people "Forget where they came from."

So Sorry...
Yes, I'm afraid I can't agree with any of the reviews above, except that they are all right in saying that this movie certainly is not at all funny. (The only funny thing, in fact, is Whoopi Goldberg's absurd glasses.) This movie is a real snore. It doesn't start anywhere, and it doesn't go anywhere. It's too long and it pieces together all kinds of different scenes without any kind of rationale. The idea of the cost of upward mobility is interesting, but the execution is flawed, and I can understand why more people haven't heard of this movie.