When James Earl Jones died in September at 93, he left behind a great performance that, for 25 years, has gone virtually unseen. The movie, “The Annihilation of Fish,” directed by Charles Burnett, had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1999 but never received a proper release. Now it’s getting a second chance, in a restoration that opens Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
“I hope people see it in a fresh light, and look at the talent,” Burnett, 80, said by phone from his home in Los Angeles.
A great deal has changed since 1999: Burnett’s masterpiece “Killer of Sheep,” completed in 1977 and accorded a belated opening in 2007, is more widely available than it had been in those intervening years, and an honorary Oscar for Burnett in 2017 put a spotlight on a body of work that has long been championed by critics. The loose movement from which Burnett emerged — the group of film students at the University of California, Los Angeles, who became known as the L.A. Rebellion — has been the subject of academic attention in recent years. And while Jones’s death occurred after the restoration of “The Annihilation of Fish” was completed, the prospect of seeing the actor in one of his finest roles offers yet another reason to check out this surreal and disarming film.
Jones plays Obediah Johnson, an immigrant from Jamaica who begins the movie having spent 10 years under institutional care. Obediah, who goes by the name Fish, is tormented by visions of being attacked by a demon — an invisible presence that he repeatedly tries to wrestle into submission, baffling those around him.
Released from his supervised living situation, Fish makes his way from New York to Los Angeles; he figures that the City of Angels will give him an advantage over a demon. Upon arrival, he moves into a boardinghouse run by an eccentric landlady, Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder). Soon they are joined by the woman who becomes the home’s only other resident, Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave), who is running from an invisible companion of her own: the ghost of Puccini, her lover, with whom she has called it quits. (They can’t marry because California law requires a corporeal presence.)
On paper, the film, written by the Jamaican novelist Anthony C. Winkler, who died in 2015, sounds overly precious, but the seriousness with which Burnett regards Fish and Poinsettia will not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with “To Sleep With Anger,” his 1990 film, in which a Los Angeles family is visited by a demonic figure (Danny Glover) from their old lives in the Deep South. Burnett didn’t write “Fish,” as he did “Anger,” but he noted what he described as the “mythical” sense of character that the films share.
“I hadn’t really done comedy before,” Burnett said of Winkler’s script, which was brought to him by the producer Paul Heller. “And I didn’t look at it as a comedy.” The film, in which Fish and Poinsettia eventually embark on a romance, has a comic element, but it also has a serious underpinning. Loneliness has brought the characters to this point, Burnett explained, to a place where they can recognize their respective brands of madness and achieve a kind of harmony. “You can’t function without companionship, without having gone through disappointments,” the director said. It was a challenge, he noted, to see if he could make the film’s strange sense of humor work.
In a sense, “The Annihilation of Fish” presents a challenge to viewers as well: They have to get to a point where they can see Fish and Poinsettia’s folie à deux — or perhaps folie à trois, since, in a break with genre conventions, Mrs. Muldroone accepts her tenants’ madness without fuss — as credible and even poignant. Burnett recalled looking for nuances that would put the audience in Fish’s head. When Fish throws the “demon” out of the boardinghouse window, for instance, the bush below shakes.
Burnett remembered how Jones threw himself into the part. (Jones so much enjoyed eating the curried goat that Fish cooks, Burnett said, that he would continue eating after a cut was called, risking continuity issues — but it was fun to watch.) And even though Jones had knee troubles, he worked to make the demon-wrestling visceral. “He did most of his stunts himself,” Burnett said. “Not the real, real hard ones, but the ones that he was on the floor with — we worried that he might hurt himself, but he was a real trouper.”
It’s an unusual film, and it’s understandable that some original viewers couldn’t sync with its peculiar wavelength. Heller, who died in 2020, blamed its distribution woes on a pan in the trade magazine Variety. Writing in 1999, the critic Todd McCarthy described “The Annihilation of Fish” as “a drear moment in the careers of all concerned” that “will go over big with everyone who ever craved seeing a bed scene with James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave.”
Yet the film’s off-center depiction of isolation and a search for connection holds up much better than that in “American Beauty,” which played at the same Toronto festival to a swell of critical support.
Burnett said that “Fish” went over well elsewhere — he recalled showing it near San Diego in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the audience seemed eager to embrace its portrait of love and compassion — but until now, it has been a film that got away. A quarter-century later — thanks to the restoration efforts of Milestone Films, the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation — audiences have a chance to discover it. (Milestone and the U.C.L.A. archive also revived “Killer of Sheep.”)
Burnett’s early films have been credited for their honest rendering of Black working-class life in Los Angeles, a milieu rarely shown, or at best sensationalized, by Hollywood. In “The Annihilation of Fish,” he sought to show characters who live in their own world, but to keep it serious, to make them real. “You see people on the street here in Los Angeles, and it’s become such a thing that you see all the time now,” he said. “You wonder about who these people are.”
He recalled an experience encountering a man on public transit in New York who told him a story about having to make a scene to get medication that he knew he needed. “It was a way to function in this country,” Burnett said. As with the characters in “Fish,” he added, “There’s some logic to this madness, you might say.”
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