Hopefully you already know who Charles Burnett is, but if not, he may be the most important filmmaker of the past 50 years you’ve never heard of. He received an honorary Oscar in 2017 for being “a resolutely independent and influential film pioneer who has chronicled the lives of black Americans with eloquence and insight,” and his 1978 film Killer of Sheep is undoubtedly one of the most influential movies of the last half-century.
Despite Burnett’s importance, his movies haven’t always been the easiest to find, and so, many of us rejoiced when his 1999 film The Annihilation of Fish was recently released for the first time, after showing 26 years ago at the Toronto Film Festival before a negative review scared off distributors. I’ve read that review and, well, I don’t agree.
The movie stars James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave as two people in the later years of their lives who end up staying at the same boarding house in Los Angeles. They each have their own, um, eccentricities, in that Jones believes he is periodically attacked by and must wrestle a demon named Hank, and Redgrave believes it’s her destiny to marry the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who at that point had been dead for quite some time.
There’s a lot in the film that isn’t meant to be taken literally, and if you insist on a literal reading of it, you may struggle with its strangeness and silliness. But metaphor exists for a reason, and while the movie mostly treats things lightly as Jones and Redgrave find non-Puccini-based romance in each other, there are also a lot of prickly ideas here, including how difficult it can be to let parts of your life go even when they’re actively destructive to your happiness.
The Annihilation of Fish is available to stream for free through Kanopy, along with a handful of Burnett’s other films, including Killer of Sheep. All you need is to sign up with your library card.
