By Leonard L. Quart
In 1983, Charles Burnett’s rough cut of his second film, “My Brother’s Wedding” was rushed by his producers to the New York Film Festival before he had completed a final edit. It received a mixed review from the New York Times, scaring off distributors, and was subsequently never released. The recent successful reissue of “Killer of Sheep” gave Burnett the opportunity to complete the film the way he had initially wanted. Its restoration by Pacific Film Archive, and its accomplished digital re-edit by Burnett (from 115 minutes to 81), allows us to finally see the director’s version of the film.
“My Brother’s Wedding,” made on a miniscule budget and with a mostly non-professional cast, is a tragic-comedy that takes place on Burnett’s home turf — an African-American South Central Los Angeles of broken sidewalks, vacant stores, and empty streets. Its central figure, Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas), is a lean, callow, unemployed thirty-year-old without future prospects, who is biding his time working at his parents’ dry cleaning shop. The focal point of the film’s narrative is the planned wedding of his successful, uptight, lawyer brother to Sonia (played by Burnett’s wife, Gaye Shannon Burnett) — a pretty, upper-middle-class black woman, whose somewhat caricatured behavior is a mixture of nervous agitation and snobbery. Pierce has only contempt for Sonia and his brother’s upwardly mobile world of Mexican maids, formal dinners, and a gleaming, large home (evoked in a heavy-handed satiric scene). And without constraint, he continues blurting out what he feels.
He also has little use for his parents’ traditional, church-going world, though he remains a caring son and grandson. His pious, Bible-toting strong mother (Jessie Holmes) loves him, but continually compares his going nowhere existence to his brother’s supposedly model, upper-middle-class behavior. Basically she treats Pierce like an adolescent (and in many ways he is emotionally undeveloped), who is a constant embarrassment to her and whom she hopes will become more responsible. The scenes with his mother vary from being utterly realistic to being a touch too broad, despite their comic intent.
Pierce is a sweet man, who wouldn’t injure a soul, but it’s the world of his ex-con, best buddy, Soldier (Ronald E. Bell), he embraces, not his brother or mother’s values. In fact, he romanticizes inner city culture — viewing it as authentic and without pretense. However, though Burnett depicts the neighborhood with an insider’s fondness, he also understands there is an underside. It’s an ethos where women are abused and treated as disposable sexual objects, and crime, guns, and drugs are ubiquitous. Soldier may warmly wrestle and shadow box with Pierce, but he is just a petty thief, and a crude, compulsive womanizer. And Pierce does nothing more than passively support him, and constantly run through the streets — a metaphor for how unsettled he is. At the film’s conclusion, Pierce is left trapped — unable to make a decision about which direction to go with his life.
Pierce’s plight is affecting and painfully real, but, at times, some of the cast’s amateurish line readings undermine the film’s poignancy. But Burnett has a gift for veering from the central narrative and capturing the comedy and pathos of everyday life: A customer at the dry cleaner’s with a variety of aliases can’t find his clothes, and another comes with a giant hole in his pants that defies mending; Pierce has an admirer, a teenage girl, just reaching puberty, who can’t stop awkwardly flirting with him; Pierce and his father primarily communicate by affectionately wrestling with each other; and Pierce gently bathes his ailing grandfather, and helps him urinate.
“My Brother’s Wedding” is not as visually lyrical a film as Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep,” but its portrait of African-American Los Angeles is a richly complex one. Burnett depicts an inner city with as many hard working and church-going people as there are people choosing to live predatory and lost lives. It’s a world he loves, but never romanticizes.
Picture Courtesy Milestone Films
