PG | 2 h 8 min | Drama | 1961
Lorraine Hansberry begins her award-winning play with one word that describes the living room of a poor, mid-20th-century black household: weariness. Weariness has won, Hansberry writes of her characters’ living room, because everything in it has been sat on, used, and scrubbed too often. All pretenses have long since vanished from it. A table here or maybe a chair there has been shifted over the years to hide a worn carpet. Unsurprisingly, weariness and hiding permeate the movie that Hansberry’s play inspired.
A windfall in the form of a life insurance check compels the needy Younger family to sift want from need. And as if that were not enough, its tantalizing promise of a better life within their grasp, yet somehow out of reach, forces them to decide what their values are.
Matriarch Lena (Claudia McNeil) fancies buying a house that she and her now dead husband never could. Her son, Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier), fancies rising from chauffeuring to investing. His wife, Ruth (Ruby Dee), imagines that a newer, larger place will give son Travis the space he needs to thrive. Lena’s daughter, Beneatha (Diana Sands), dreams of becoming a doctor, with a respectable suitor in tow.
Thanks to Walter’s wantonness, the family risks losing it all. They’ve hidden their wants for so long that their needs and values now lie bare. It’s like someone’s wrapped a giant plastic bag over the entire house. Walter is “choking,” but everyone else is suffocating, too. They’re looking for a door, a window, just to breathe. The drudgery, the waiting is nearly killing them. Only, it doesn’t.
Ruth has to haul herself out of bed each morning, heave little Travis off the couch (doubling up as his bed), and snarl at Walter until he rises, too, so they can all quickly use the common bathroom in the corridor outside, before neighbors get there. The kitchen also houses the dining table, while the dining room houses the couch. They’re walking in on other conversations that they’d much rather hide from each other. They’re conspiring against others to earn as much as they do. They’re conspiring against each other, so they don’t have to put off their pet projects.
A Mother’s Wisdom
Yet amid despair, there’s hope. The toughest lessons come from Lena. She reminds them that money—the having or hoarding of it or the losing of it—isn’t everything. When they wonder what’s left to love in each other when they’re being denied their aspirations, she reminds them how cowardly it is to love only when someone fulfills your wishes.Lena worries that her children struggle with their sense of self worth because they lack the ability to buy things at will. She recalls that it isn’t the material things one bequeathes to children that instill in them a sense of personhood, but the values one lives by. When she watches young Travis looking up at his father as a possible role model, she realizes that it isn’t too late to reinforce the right values.
Lena turns on Beneatha for turning on her brother, Walter. “Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning—because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ’cause the world done whipped him so! When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right. … Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.”
It’s hard for any co-star to shine alongside the incandescent Poitier, but Dee, McNeil, and Sands do. They paint an agonizing portrait of individuals dying to strike out on their own but finding that their hope of a better future and their resilience flows precisely from their togetherness. Slowly, painfully, even humorously, they learn to embrace opportunities to love more, live more, and to whine (a little) less about their infuriatingly elusive dreams.
Lena’s words will haunt everyone who’s ever lived in poverty: “Sometimes you just got to know when to give up some things and hold on to what you got.” Hansberry’s point, as screenwriter, is that these characters ought to haunt those who’ve never lived in poverty, too, generating empathy and generosity toward those who don’t enjoy the luxury of choice that they do.
