To Sleep With Anger (1990, Charles Burnett) (Patreon)

56/100

Second viewing, last seen during its original theatrical run. It was my first Burnett, and I vaguely recall feeling a bit bewildered by it, insufficiently versed in the relevant African-American folklore. This time I was able to e.g. pause the film and google "toby" (which is basically what I'd assumed: a good luck charm), but that didn't much help in parsing the ambiguous—at least to me—cause/effect relationships here. Harry is clearly a chaos agent of some sort, perhaps the devil in human form, and Glover's unnervingly chummy-sinister performance should have been Oscar-nominated (though he'd have been steamrolled by Joe Pesci, like everyone else). But I have trouble reconciling Harry's active steps to undermine family cohesion—constantly bringing up others’ past trangressions, committing small invasive acts like clipping his toenails in the living room, turning Junior and Babe Brother into Cain and Abel—with what seems more like bad-penny misfortune that simply follows him into the house. Or even precedes him into the house, if we're to assume that Gideon falls ill in part because he lost his toby (which occurs prior to Harry's arrival). Might not bother many others, but I'm too much of a glutton for cohesion to roll with a character who functions as both Iago and an unwitting jinx/catalyst of some sort. Though, again, it's entirely possible that this combination is rooted in trickster folklore of which I'm largely ignorant. In any case, the film is arguably most valuable not for its plot, or even for its mostly stellar cast, but as a rare (especially for the time) portrait of an ordinary middle-class black family in South Central, with not even a passing mention of drugs or gang violence. I much prefer the myth-inflected family intrigue of Eve's Bayou (with which To Sleep shares one key actor, Ethel Ayler—Hattie here, the grandma there), but seeing a similar tale play out in sunny L.A., rather than moody LA, is ultra-refreshing.