The film’s name is too big and imposing for what turns out to be a small film masked as a poignant family tale, a grandfather fighting to keep his black grandchild in the face of PC challenges by his clamoring dead daughter’s in-laws.  Kevin Costner as Elliot Anderson is a sometimes absent-minded grieving widower drawn into a noisy and occasionally insistent custody battle over his granddaughter, whom he has raised her entire young life.

Because, the story informs us in scenes of angry confrontation between sturdy character actor Octavia Spencer, as Rowena Jeffers, mother-in-law of Costner/Elliot’s now-dead daughter, and Octavia’s ne’er-do-well aimless yet irresponsibly rascally son, and working professional Kevin Costner, Caucasian fathers missing their spouses cannot properly raise a differently racial child.  Really?

Even the names seem to be handed out by Central Casting.  Rowena?  Eloise?  In 2015?  

This is a movie that forgot what decade to come out in.  Somewhere around the late ’60s or early ’70s would be our best guess.

Though the acting is uniformly good, especially the little girl, played adorably yet without affectation by Jillian Estell (as Eloise Anderson), there is no special reason to see the film.  It hauls out the same hoary chestnuts of alleged race disparities that never made all that much sense when they were used to attack cross-color families back when dinosaurs roamed the plains.  White kids need white families, and the obverse.  Nonsense.  The “reasons” adduced by the in-laws make less sense now.

Eloise and her fit, thoughtful grandfather live well, she is being educated in fine schools, she has artistic pretensions (like any other normal child her age), is well behaved, has excellent communication and study skills, and is clearly the apple of Anderson’s eye.  She rarely if ever sees her birth father, who is ambling about out of eyeshot with dreams of musical or artistic glory that play not well with his mother, Rowena.  Afraid of commitment, he disappoints his daughter whenever he does make a plan to see her.

What benefit greater than what already she has would accrue if she went across town to the shambling, easy-going, religiously strict homestead with a generational ladder stereotyping this black family?  Rowena is the consummate entrepreneur, running a thriving business out of her garage, but otherwise, her brood is well-inclined to Eloise but underwhelming in terms of occupations and income.

Wait: maybe there’s a teachable moment here.  The adult kids get the benefits and largesse of Rowena’s thriving business, but listlessly fail to invest on their own.  Wonder what that points to?

Sure, the little girl being raised with all the comforts of a professional and well-heeled father is winning.  And sure, the black family at the other side of town is warm, rambunctious, and culturally noble – by definition, we guess, if quarrelsome and more in need of social counseling and parent-child intervention than is the more even-keeled Costner.  Director Binder is a competent craftsman, but the film at large is a sop to the boisterous Civil Rights movement and still lingering sensations of historical guilt. 

Not only is Costner not having any of it, but neither are we.  Tyler Perry’s audience may like it – may get those warm cockles zinging in the area of the heart.  But for most, it panders and condescends.  Genteelly, but definitively.