The 80-year-old Charles Burnett is often thought of as one of American cinema's last true independents. His movies, most of which focus on working-class Black families in his home city of Los Angeles, have been underseen, underexposed and sometimes misunderstood.
In the past couple of decades, Burnett's been rightly recognized as one of the greats; his 1978 first feature, Killer of Sheep, was released in theatres in 2007 and widely hailed as a masterpiece. Burnett himself received an honorary Oscar in 2017.
Critics have played their part in Burnett's rediscovery, though some have been blamed for burying his work in the first place. His 1983 feature, My Brother's Wedding, was never properly released, for reasons often attributed to a mixed review in The New York Times. And this week brings the overdue arrival of Burnett's 1999 comedy, The Annihilation of Fish, which, because of a pan from Variety, as the story goes, never landed an American distributor. That we can see it now, nearly 26 years later, is due to the remarkable efforts of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, The Film Foundation and Milestone Films, which worked together to restore the movie; it's now getting a limited theatrical release.
There are a lot of reasons to seek out The Annihilation of Fish, especially since it's a rare chance to see three late, great actors onscreen together: Lynn Redgrave, Margot Kidder and James Earl Jones, who died just last year at the age of 93.
Here, a 60-something Jones plays a Jamaican American man who goes by the name Fish, and who's just been released from a 10-year stay in an LA mental institution. Fish isn't a danger to anyone; he's honest and unfailingly polite. Every so often, though, he gets into an aggressive wrestling match with a demon that only he apparently can see.
Around the same time, we meet Redgrave's character, a San Francisco woman named Poinsettia, who, like Fish, has an active fantasy life. She believes she's being romanced by Puccini; imagine if Miss Havisham from Great Expectations were an opera buff and you're halfway there.
Through a strange turn of events, Poinsettia moves to LA and rents an apartment in a boarding house just across the hall from Fish. The house otherwise appears to be empty except for their watchful landlady, Mrs. Muldroone, played by a lovely Kidder.
One night, Fish finds Poinsettia passed out, drunk, outside his door, and brings her inside his apartment so she can sleep it off. From this odd encounter is born an equally odd friendship. Despite some initial wariness, they soon take a liking to each other and spend their days together playing cards. While Puccini's ghost is pretty much history at this point, Fish's demon is still very active. During one of their wrestling bouts, Fish asks Poinsettia to referee, even though she, of course, can't see the demon herself.
While he clearly isn't afraid of broad comedy, Burnett has no use for strained quirkiness. He doesn't deploy his characters as cheap comic relief, or treat their strangeness as a problem to be solved; he finds the loopy logic even in their most illogical behavior.
I think he wants us to look at Fish and Poinsettia pretty much the same way the landlady, Mrs. Muldroone, does: Although a touch stern at first, she comes to accept and even appreciate them in all their eccentricities. Whatever may ail Fish and Poinsettia, friendship and love appear to be the only medicine they need. Fish cooks Poinsettia Jamaican food, she takes him to the park, and in time, their bond turns romantic.
At one point, Fish worries that the two of them have nothing in common, to which Poinsettia replies, "Old is what we have in common!" It's one of many lines I laughed at in The Annihilation of Fish, which doesn't shy away from the realities of aging or the fitful complications of an interracial romance. But it doesn't inflate those things into obstacles, either.
What finally makes Fish and Poinsettia seem like an ideal match is simply the chemistry between the actors themselves — the way Jones' gravitas tempers Redgrave's intensity, and the way her wild energy brings out his own. Burnett has made a simple yet beguiling film about how two imperfect people can find a kind of perfection in each other's company — and how sometimes in life, and in the movies, good things do come to those who wait.
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