The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999) (Patreon)

In getting started on the films of Charles Burnett, I decided to go with his film maudit, something I would probably never have gotten around to watching were it not for this project. Although there are Burnett films with worse reputations (e.g., his film about Namibia), The Annihilation of Fish is the movie that a fair number of critics and audiences saw upon its release, and the reaction was, shall we say, unkind. So I expected Annihilation to be an edifying chore, in the sense that I would learn about Burnett as an artist by examining his bad creative choices.

So I never would have expected just how delightful Annihilation is. Although there are certain stylistic and narrative elements that I can understand as being theoretically offputting, the film struck me as a coherent aesthetic statement that suffered in part because this isn't the sort of work one might expect from Burnett. It's a low-key tragicomic fantasy piece, very much in the vein of Alan Rudolph or Paul Mazursky. There's not much about Annihilation that's particularly naturalistic. However, Burnett brings something quite different to the table than those post-Altman stylists. In ways that never stop being surprising, Annihilation repeatedly foregrounds race and class, emphasizing the fact that the film's would-be lovers have a number of forces working against them.

A lot of the pleasure of Annihilation comes from watching three consummate pros at work. James Earl Jones is awkward in just the right ways as Fish (aka Obidiah Johnson), a Jamaican immigrant from New York. A widower and a former bus terminal employee, his mental illness stemmed from losing his job and feeling useless. So he is continually tasked with wrestling an invisible demon called Hank. Opposite Jones is Lynn Redgrave, as Poinsettia (aka Flower Cummings), an opera fan from San Francisco, a woman with a tragic but all-too-common backstory. When we meet her, she is shepherding around an invisible friend who, we find out, is her "lover," the late Giacomo Puccini. (From the looks of it, the composer's ghost is great in bed.) For no apparent reason, both Fish and Poinsetta leave their respective cities and arrive in Los Angeles, at the dingy boarding house of Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder), a woman with mental troubles of her own.

As you can imagine, this is very much a set-up that would allow Burnett and company to make a cloying film that treats mental illness as a lovable quirk, even implying that the insane have a purer or more childlike outlook, one to which we should all aspire. I'd be lying if I suggested that the film avoided these pitfalls completely. Annihilation of Fish does feature unstable senior citizens behaving delusionally. Burnett is walking a tonal tightrope and he slips on occasion. But mostly, Annihilation establishes its premises and plays them straight, as if the entire enterprise were about affording dignity to characters who had been summarily discarded, not so much out of fear as embarrassment. Jones and Redgrave are brutally frank about their sexuality, particularly how their bodily degeneration conflicts with their desire for pleasure. But even after Fish and Poinsettia have figured each other out, there's a  sense that, for their generation, a portly Caribbean Black man and a dotty white lady are an odd couple, neither person's ideal or expected mate.

There are essential formal conflicts at the heart of The Annihilation of Fish that no doubt doomed its initial reception. If one deemed it an "interesting failure," I wouldn't protest all that vociferously. That's a fair cop. But wholesale dismissals just seem to miss the point. It's not just that folks are often squeamish about geriatric sex, although there is that. Burnett and his three actors are telling a story that, in conventional terms, we'd expect to see presented as either wacky and grotesque or as a sad, unadorned chamber piece. But Annihilation seems to find a middle way, suggesting that the loneliness of aging only seems adorable to those witnessing it from far on the other side.

NOTE: After reading all the terrible reviews, I thought I'd check in with Letterboxd  to see what the verdict was. Big praise all around, from Jake Cole, Forrest Cardamenis, Jeva Lange, Sam Bodrojan, and Felipe Furtado I have a very good feed!