‘The Annihilation of Fish’ review: Burnett’s empathy shines

No movie deserves the ignominious burial that Charles Burnett’s 1999 romantic drama originally received. Premiering at the Toronto Film Festival before making its way to a few subsequent events, it essentially vanished in the wake of a negative Variety review, failing to secure distribution and seemingly destined to languish in obscurity. But to watch “The Annihilation of Fish” now, 26 years after its debut, that frustrating backstory only adds extra poignancy to a picture already suffused with it. A tale of two troubled souls who find each other, the movie has become an even stronger tribute to the people (not to mention the art) we so easily push aside.

Finally released after a meticulous restoration by, among others, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, “The Annihilation of Fish” is especially welcome here in Los Angeles, which is both the movie’s setting and the home of its director, whose films have too often suffered delayed or indifferent theatrical runs. A key figure in the L.A. Rebellion (named for the group of SoCal filmmakers in the 1970s dedicated to telling stories about Black life), Burnett directed the most pivotal work of the movement, 1977’s “Killer of Sheep,” which took 30 years to get a proper release due to music rights issues. (It currently sits tied at No. 43 on Sight and Sound’s critics poll of the greatest motion pictures ever made.) Similarly, Burnett’s 1983 drama “My Brother’s Wedding” was shown at the New York Film Festival in an incomplete version, but an underwhelmed critical reaction doomed the movie, until Burnett was finally able to re-edit and effectively finish it in 2007.

Burnett’s cinema often focuses on everyday characters inhabiting a working-class L.A. far removed from the glamour of Hollywood. So it should be no surprise that he has enormous affection for the people who populate “The Annihilation of Fish” — even if few other filmmakers know what to do with them. Fish (James Earl Jones), who was born in Jamaica, has just arrived in L.A. by bus from New York, where he lived in a mental institution that decided it couldn’t do anything more for him. His disturbing outbursts, in which he’s convinced he must battle a demon, ultimately proved too much. Meanwhile, Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave) has recently abandoned San Francisco after the death of her beloved. There’s a catch, though: She believes she was romantically involved with famed Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, constantly talking to him as if he was right next to her.

A dash of cosmic fate conspires for Fish and Poinsettia to rent apartments in the same Echo Park boarding house, run by Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder), an emotionally disheveled widow who has a story about her last name and her late husband if you’ve got the time. She’s just eccentric enough that she doesn’t question the delusions harbored by her new tenants, and Burnett challenges his audience to embrace Fish and Poinsettia in the same spirit.

Not that “The Annihilation of Fish” has any patience for the cutesy tendencies that sometimes attend love stories about people with mental health problems. Burnett never insists that they’re the sane ones, nor does he infantilize Fish and Poinsettia’s afflictions. Instead, he applies a bracing matter-of-factness to their skewed reality. Occasionally, Fish will be seized with adrenaline as he prepares to wrestle that demon, dangerously flailing around his apartment while Laura Karpman’s lilting score shifts into a jazz-infused cacophony of drums and horns. At other times, Poinsettia’s rampant neediness comes spilling out, resulting in anger or despair. “The Annihilation of Fish” observes it all with a calm eye, waiting until we acclimate to these unusual circumstances. Somewhere along the way, they will fall in love, and we’ll fall in love with them.

His film legacy built on Darth Vader and Mufasa, Jones rarely got an opportunity to play the love interest outside of 1974’s “Claudine.” So it’s rewarding to see him as the kindly but shy Fish, nicely paired with Redgrave, whose Poinsettia is more temperamental but also more affectionate and open. A friendship blossoms thanks to a shared affection for gin rummy, but Jones slowly reveals Fish’s tenderness, the possibility of romance spreading out in front of him. (He still has anxieties, though: Back in Jamaica, interracial love affairs were taboo.)

Much of “The Annihilation of Fish” takes place in and around the boarding house, but Burnett and cinematographer John Njaga Demps occasionally take the couple out into Echo Park as they go for a walk or ride a paddleboat, the gentle hum of a vibrant city in the background. And while Burnett’s career has been marked by a stripped-down realism, his Indie Spirit-winning 1990 drama “To Sleep With Anger” hinted at the otherworldly. Similar mysteries occur in “The Annihilation of Fish”: Each time Fish hurls that imaginary demon out the window of his second-story apartment, the tree below inexplicably shakes briefly. Are we imagining things? Or are we falling under the same spell as the characters?

There’s a theatricality to the actors’ portrayal of mental illness that threatens to clash with the film’s otherwise spare presentation. But Jones and Redgrave have such a consistency in how they play these skittish lovers that it drives home the point that their cruel, untamed condition doesn’t adhere to the niceties of narrative convention. Never arbitrary but always unwieldy, Fish and Poinsettia’s issues are unpredictably ever-present, and Burnett has enough respect for the characters not to believe that a happily-ever-after will “cure” them. They are who they are, in sickness and in health.

To experience this film is to be overcome with melancholy. The love story’s fragility makes such a sentiment inescapable, but so is the sight of so many faces who are no longer with us. Redgrave died in 2010, Jones last year. Kidder died in 2018, her own struggles with mental illness well documented and heartbreaking. Beyond its examination of mental health and race, “The Annihilation of Fish” is a story about mortality in which two older individuals, each unsure if love will ever visit them again, discover that maybe their final chapter hasn’t yet been written. It’s a fitting metaphor for a film that risked being forgotten — at long last, its time has come.