The trouble with Harry in Charles Burnett’s magically realist “To Sleep With Anger” isn’t immediately apparent.
When Danny Glover’s charmer arrives in Los Angeles from the South, his relatives are all too pleased to welcome him. He’s a much-needed blast from a rural past.
The astounding Mary Alice and Paul Butler play Suzie and Gideon, the parents of Junior (Carl Lumbly) and Babe Brother (Richard Brooks). If the sons’ names sound purposefully vague, it’s because their struggles grow into a tussle with a decidedly biblical bent.
The 1990 film won the writer-director an award for his work, and Danny Glover kudos for best actor at the Independent Spirit Awards. It received a special jury recognition that year at the Sundance Film Festival.
Still, there is a good chance you never saw it. More bedeviling, you might not know Burnett’s name.
Yet the 61-year-old director’s stunning meditation on working life in South Central Los Angeles, “Killer of Sheep” (1977), was selected for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. In 1988, the Mississippi-born director was a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, or “genius” grant, as it has come to be known.
He’s often been called the most important American filmmaker you’ve never heard of. Pieces about him bemoan that anonymity even as they celebrate his status as a cult figure.
Starting Thursday, the Starz FilmCenter provides a balm to this ache for more Burnett. As a part of the Filmmaker in Residence program, Burnett will be in town showing “To Sleep With Anger,” the never-distributed “The Annihilation of Fish,” and a work-in-
progress about Namibia’s founding president, Sam Nujoma.
Burnett shot “Nujoma: Where Others Wavered” in Namibia after he was approached by some first-time producers from the southern African nation. It stars Lumbly and Glover.
From L.A., Burnett spoke of the burden of making such a politically important work.
“I really felt obligated to make the film work,” he said, especially because it is a “very political film that has to do with Namibians, and it looks at the U.S. very critically.”
It’s the sort of weight Burnett has willingly shouldered in all his films. “Let the world see us as we are,” he said of what he wants his movies to do. “With all the flaws, the good and bad.”
He’s less interested in offering an alternative reality than fuller one.
“When I’ve gone abroad with ‘To Sleep With Anger,’ some person asked: Why did you clean up the black people? My heart sunk. But people were being honest about these questions, not racist.” They were expressing a vision shaped by popular images.
“He doesn’t do gang violence, and I think the pressure on African-American filmmakers to do gang violence is immense from all sorts of directions,” said the FilmCenter’s director of education, Howie Movshovitz, who will be introducing Burnett and his films.
“Burnett does families and odd combinations of people who are interesting, basically law abiding, not necessarily urban,” he said.
And he does them in a way that maneuvers reality and his characters’ more fanciful beliefs.
In “To Sleep With Anger” things go South – so to speak – when Gideon loses his toby, his good-luck charm. Soon, he’s bedridden. The relationship between his already battling sons gets more volatile. Babe Brother succumbs to Harry’s countrified come-ons.
Indeed, Glover’s Harry seduces nearly everyone. But he goes from colorful to devilish to dangerous. Eventually he feels like the devil, toying with a good middle-class family.
In “The Annihilation of Fish,” James Earl Jones gives a wildly physical performance as a Jamaican man with recurring mission: wrestling a cheating, eye-gouging, crotch-kicking demon by the name of Hank.
“Deinstitutionalized,” Fish travels from a New York City mental health residence to L.A. and a boarding house run by an eccentric widow named Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder).
On a similar journey to Mrs. Muldroone’s abode is Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave), who disrupts an outdoor concert of Madame Butterfly by carrying on with her invisible lover – the opera’s composer, Giacomo Puccini.
What impresses in Burnett’s vision of three seemingly damaged souls is how much compassion he shows. He’s wonderfully willing to acknowledge the power of the invisible, the unseen.
His work shouldn’t go unseen. This weekend you have a chance to witness its subtle power.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
Charles Burnett
MOVIES|Starz FilmCenter at the Tivoli, Ninth Street and Auraria Parkway; “To Sleep With Anger” 7 p.m., Thursday; “The Annihilation of Fish” 7 p.m., Friday; “Nujoma: Where Others Have Wavered” 7 p.m. Saturday|$5.50-$8.50|303.820-3456
