For a made-for-TV movie, A Raisin in the Sun comes with high expectations. It is based on the 2004 stage revival of Lorraine Hansberry's play (which in 1959 became the first written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway), was itself turned into a film starring Sidney Poitier, and was once described by The New York Times as having "changed American theatre forever".
Three generations of the Younger family live together in a rundown apartment in Chicago, and as the film begins are trying to decide what to do with a $10,000 life insurance cheque they have received after the death of the patriarch, Walter. The son Walter Lee (Sean Combs, better known as the rapper Puff Daddy, surprisingly good), wants to invest in a business deal; his sister Beneatha (Sanaa Lathan) hopes it will fund her medical school tuition fees. Hansberry took the title from Langston Hughes' poem Harlem, which asked "What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/Like a raisin in the sun?", and the story that unfolds is both human drama and an indictment of a society where racial prejudice trumps the right to the pursuit of happiness.
The film never shakes off its roots on the stage, but it is a graceful and moving adaptation of a still-important classic.
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