To Sleep With The Fish

My thoughts on The Annihilation of Fish

Despite being hailed as one of the great American filmmakers of the postwar generation and a leading voice in Black cinema long before the emergence of Spike Lee thanks to such films as Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding, Charles Burnett has had an extraordinarily bumpy career. With the exception of his audacious and still-galvanizing 1990 dark comedy To Sleep with Anger, his films have either suffered at the hands of their distributors (his great 1994 crime drama The Glass Shield was largely buried by Harvey Weinstein for no particular reason), sent to television with little fanfare (Nightjohn) or have fallen into obscurity since their release (Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation). Perhaps the most snakebit title in his filmography was The Annihilation of Fish, an offbeat romantic comedy that made its debut at the 1999 Toronto film festival and, following a number of bad reviews, was put on a shelf and never released at all. Now, the rights have been restored and the film is at long last being screened publicly after a gap of time so long that the actors playing the three central characters have all since passed on.

The Fish of the title is Obadiah “Fish” Johnson (James Earl Jones), a man who has just been released from a mental institution after ten years and who is haunted by a demon with whom he is constantly—and literally—wrestling. He winds up moving into a building managed by the eccentric Mrs. Muldoone (Margot Kidder), a woman who is constantly tending a particular weed in he garden and who does not particularly care what you do in your room, as long as you make sure to spell her name correctly. Before long, another boarder arrives in the form of Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave), an alcoholic widow who is bereft that she is being prevented from marrying her new love, the ghost of opera composer Giacomo Puccini. After finding her passed out one night in the hallway following a drinking binge, Fish takes Poinsettia into his room to sleep it off and a friendship develops between the two—Fish even asks her to referee his wrestling matches—that eventually blossoms into romance. However, once that happens, Fish’s demon disappears and since those battles have been the driving force of his entire existence for the past decade, he is torn between going back to the way things were or forging a new existence with Poinsettia.

Needless to say, this is a decidedly eccentric film in practically every imaginable aspect and even those with a working familiarity of Burnett’s oeuvre might have been take back by its loopy narrative, characters and tone, all of which make it feel closer to one of Alan Rudolph’s odder romantic fantasias than anything else. And yet, if you can get through establishing scenes without being put off—and can overlook both the shifts in tones from broad slapstick to pathos in Anthony C. Winkler’s screenplay and the somewhat blithe manner in which the story handles the evident mental illnesses of the two main characters—there is a very good chance that you might spark to its equally evident charms. Considering that geriatric-age romance is still a relative rarity on movie screens—and usually depicted in ultimately tragic terms when it is seen—it is somewhat refreshing to see the subject treated in a refreshingly straightforward manner as it is here, right down to the handling of the topic of sex. The performances from the three leads are also quite nice as well with Jones and Redgrave developing a fascinating and strangely convincing on-screen relationship as their eccentric characters gradually reveal themselves as kindred spirits and Kidder providing nice support as the landlord who has a few stories of her own to share as well. All of these elements are nicely orchestrated by Burnett, who finds just the right balance to keep things from veering from the charming to the grotesque.

To be scrupulously fair, I have to admit that I can sort of understand why the film ended up being shelved for so long—it is undeniably a singular work and I can easily imagine that it might seem like fingernails on the chalkboard for those who don’t find themselves meshing with its particular wavelength. Even today, it stands so far away from the mainstream that it might seem even more jarring to contemporary viewers than it did to those few who saw it back in 1999. And yet, while it may not hit the heights of such Burnett masterworks as Killer of Sheep or To Sleep with Anger, it still has a likable, lyrical feel to it that kept me engaged from start to finish and if you are constantly yearning to see a film that is more interested in its characters than its action beats and which steadfastly refuses to follow the increasingly rigid rules that have made too many American movies feel like filmed deals than anything else, The Annihilation of Fish might just be the kind of weirdly engaging work that you have been seeking out.