(3 of 3)
I'll Fly Away rises above mere nostalgia, but it doesn't avoid romanticizing the past. The Bedford children are a bit too precocious in racial matters (15- year-old Nathaniel is bold enough to visit a black juke joint to listen to the music) and Lily too poetically noble. The town's first racial protest, moreover, is a sit-in that might have been a model for Gandhi. To protest the verdict in a case that Forrest has prosecuted, demonstrators gather slowly on the courthouse steps. They sit motionless, hushed, intense -- almost holy. The way it was? Or the way TV would prefer to remember it?