My Brother's Wedding (Charles Burnett, 1983) (Patreon)

It's a bit of a mess, but it's by no means a hot mess. My Brother's Wedding has narrative bones that are a bit stronger (not to say sturdier) than those of Killer of Sheep. But this doesn't always work to the later film's advantage. It's not just that Wedding is torn between Killer's impressionism and more conventional storytelling. The two impulses are often at odds, so that watching the film is a confounding experience. I spent the first 30 minutes trying to discern who was who and what was happening, since Burnett seemed to be making his own version of a Black American Indie film. But then, for the final 45, I sensed that I was only supposed to be intuiting narrative gestures, and that the confusion was the point, to an extent.

So yeah. Is this Burnett's version of an Angela Schanelec film? Or is it a loose collection of Inglewood vignettes that generate a chronology but don't necessarily cohere? It's hard to say, since the concluding moments of My Brother's Wedding are absolutely story- and character-driven. Not only does the ending hinge on the moral choices of protagonist Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas), but Burnett constructs the semi-finale using good old fashioned accelerated cross-cutting. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the problem posed in the title of the film is addressed head-on.

Regarded as a character study, My Brother's Wedding is fairly effective, even as it undermines the basis idea of character. Pierce's class antagonism, and his friendship / romanticization of his ex-con buddy Soldier (Ronnie Bell), are at the core of most of what Burnett shows us. Events are not so much causal as explosive, since Pierce generates various situations less through decision than by impulsive acting-out. There's no obvious reason for him to detest his brother's fiancee Sonia (Gaye Shannon-Burnett), except that she represents a Black bourgeoisie that he defines himself against. The fact that he trains his resentment on her, rather than his striving brother Wendell (Monte Easter), speaks to the bonds of family and community, and the knee-jerk suspicion of outsiders. (Burnett could have easily portrayed Sonia's family as snobs, but aside from being a bit formal, they are actually pretty welcoming of the Mundys.)

As Craig Lindsey has noted in his own review, there's no getting around the awkward amateur acting woven throughout My Brother's Wedding. But even though this signifies "bad" filmmaking in the usual sense, I was actually captivated by it. Some of the exaggeratedly shady characters who show up at Pierce's family's dry cleaning business could be nods to Blaxploitation history, and the extended sequences of Pierce and Soldier running across expansive L.A. cityscapes pretty clearly recall Sweet Sweetback, especially since those shots have no particular reason to be in the film otherwise. 

It's strange. As was the case with Killer of Sheep, My Brother's Wedding works to provide a palpable sense of a particular community and the various people who live there. And yet, the acting styles scattered throughout the film (subdued, declamatory, naturalistic, amateur, cuecard-dependent, distracted) give the opposite effect. It's like everyone is acting in their own register, and by extension, their own private Inglewood. Burnett throws us in the deep end of a life-world that is already moving at its own pace. There's little attempt to acclimate the viewer to the family itself, the inter- and intra-family strife, or the supporting characters who show up almost at random. 

But at the same time, Burnett provides enough scaffolding to let us know that certain things are happening, and we ought to try to figure them out. And this leaves me facing a classic deconstructionist crisis. Is My Brother's Wedding a self-undermining text, working to avoid closure and ripping itself apart? Or am I letting my spectatorial proclivities (along with my respect for the director) coax me into justifying incompetence? 

I will offer this as a final point to ponder. Twice, Pierce drops in on an elderly couple, Big Momma (Cora Lee Day) and Big Daddy (Tim Wright). He attends to their physical needs, and I simply assumed they were Pierce's grandparents, although their relation to the family was never made explicit. According to a plot summary on Wikipedia, they are not family members but "community elders." This confusion is certainly not accidental. Part of Burnett's strategy in My Brother's Wedding is the demonstration of "family" as a permeable idea within a close-knit community, especially one that's forced into self-reliance because of municipal neglect. 

With this in mind, the ultimate conflict of the film -- honor your brother, or your fallen friend? -- proves more difficult for Pierce than anyone is prepared to allow. So by extension, I'm more than willing to extend this uncertainty principle to the film itself. Perhaps clean, precise continuity editing suggests divisions and boundaries of meaning that are a lot messier in our lived experience. We're all stuck in our own story, but we are unavoidably cast in the same film.