Charles Burnett is an African-American independent filmmaker who gained prominence in the 1980s. Most of his films are obscure, and he never had a mainstream hit. However, he has remained dedicated to exploring the African-American experience through film, from his groundbreaking early features depicting working class communities in Los Angeles, to his later documentaries and television films examining different facets of African-American history, for well over fifty years. My favorite of his films was made in 1999 and played a few festivals, but wasn't released in any format until 2024. It's a little out of Burnett's usual milieu, as it's less about race and class than it is about aging, love, and dealing with invisible demons.
"The Annihilation of Fish" is not the best or most important Charles Burnett film, clearly. The production values are very modest, and I initially assumed that the film was adapting a stage play, as the action rarely leaves the interiors of a single building. There's not much to the story beyond three elderly people getting to know one another. However, the cast and performances are unbeatable. James Earl Jones is one of my favorite actors, and here he has a late career leading role as the title character. Fish is a Jamaican man, newly released from a mental institution, having been deemed incurable of his delusion that a pugilistic demon named Hank keeps following him around. Fish is wonderfully polite, sincere, and charming. However, he also insists on regularly wrestling his invisible demon, greatly alarming his new boarding house neighbor Poinsettia, played by Lynn Redgrave. She's a tipsy widow who has just gotten out of a dramatic romantic relationship with the long-expired classical Italian composer, Giacomo Puccini. She deals with the breakup by singing opera and drinking heavily.
So we have two aging kooks, with their genial landlady played by Margot Kidder sometimes joining them as a third, figuring out how to make friends with one another, and eventually, bumpily and haphazardly, find their way toward romance. Along the way we learn bits and pieces about their pasts and their afflictions, and the important part is that we learn it all on their terms. The early parts of the film show Fish and Poinsettia attempting to get along among the neurotypicals, and having a hard time of it. Ultimately both of them are outsiders, separated from whatever communities they may have been a part of previously, and not equipped to seek fellowship through the usual channels. But given the opportunity for a new start, and without being biased by the opinions of others, they're able to take each other at face value and provide mutual support. Jones and Redgraves are weird and funny and utterly unencumbered in their oddity, and it's wonderful to see. Jones in particular makes a full meal of the Jamaican accent and the pantomimed wrestling sequences.
I know that I was so taken with the film in part because I was so happy to see these forgotten Jones and Redgrave performances from twenty-five years ago emerge from obscurity at last. Also, "The Annihilation of Fish" is the kind of slow, intimate, meandering indie film that we don't see often enough anymore. It's a hard film to categorize, because it defies the usual conventions of comedies, cross-cultural romances, and films about the mentally ill and dispossessed. As with all of Charles Burnett's films, Fish's status as a black man plays a great part in his struggle for self-determination. However, this is a love story, and Fish's dilemma is framed in the terms of an obstacle to romantic fulfillment. For Fish, the idea of being in a relationship with a white woman is unthinkable, and it's hinted that this may be tied to older traumas. Poinsettia, after an initial show of distaste and paranoia, fixates on the chance for love, and will not be dissuaded. The resulting courtship is messy, farcical, heartfelt, poignant, and completely unique.
Charles Burnett has one of the more interesting filmographies of the directors I've featured recently, because his work is so consistently dedicated to stories of the black diaspora, and has taken so many diverse forms. Most of his work has been in television since the mid-90s, but whether it's a feature about police corruption, or a Disney Channel film on the Civil Rights movement, or a documentary short on blues music, or an Oprah-produced miniseries on colorism, Burnett's work is uncompromising and I expect it will remain enduring.
What I've Seen - Charles Burnett
Killer of Sheep (1978)
My Brother's Wedding (1983)
To Sleep with Anger (1990)
The Glass Shield (1994)
Nightjohn (1996)
The Wedding (1998)
Selma, Lord, Selma (1999)
The Annihilation of Fish (1999)
Finding Buck McHenry (2000)
Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003)
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