Sunday, February 18, 2018

251. The Brother From Another Planet

251. The Brother From Another Planet (1984)
Director: John Sayles
Writer: John Sayles
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

A mute alien that looks like an African-American man lands in New York in an allegory of the immigrant and outsider experience.

The titular Brother crashes in the water outside Ellis Island at night. He makes his way to shore, but is missing a foot. As he touches the walls of the entryway to the US, voices ring out. He’s an empath and can hear and experience the memories imprinted in surfaces and objects. By the next morning, his three-toed foot has grown back.

What follows doesn’t have a plot, per se, although there are attempts at one which are the weakest parts of the movie. The Brother finds his way to Harlem and the film serves as a picaresque of the neighborhood in the early ‘80’s. Since he’s mute, everyone else does all the talking presenting us with visions of despair and hope, isolation and emancipation, all the things grand and banal of these people's lives. There’s prejudice and responses to prejudice, people offering mystical visions and people desperate just to have someone who’ll listen, ecstasy and death. You’ve given a picture of a community that doesn’t necessarily stick together, but does what it can not to sell others out.

The Brother has supernatural abilities. Not only can he sense the emotional ghosts in objects, he can heal—both people and electronics—by laying on hands and the latter skill earns him some money. However, he’s an escaped slave from his home planet and two white aliens, claiming to be INS, are hunting him down. This is where the movie is weakest, oddly enough because that’s where there’s a story. The pleasure of this film is just watching the Brother encounter other people and getting a glimpse of their lives.

In addition to the white aliens hunting him, the Brother is on his own mission. He finds the body of a junkie from his building in an abandoned lot. The Brother tracks the junk back to the source, an anonymous corporate type downtown, who the Brother then kills. The idea behind the subplot makes sense, but, as with the aliens hunting the Brother, it’s not as strong as the parts of the movie that are just about the people themselves.

To wrap up the plot, the white aliens finally catch up to the Brother, a chase ensues, and they all run into a group of aliens like the Brother—former slaves that have escaped to New York to begin new lives. They collectively chase off the white aliens who end up disappearing (either vaporizing themselves or teleporting back to wherever they came from) and put the Brother on the A train. The final shot is him staring out the back window as the train pulls away. THE END

This was one of the movies I was really looking forward to seeing. I knew the name and a bit of the reputation behind it, but had never really been exposed to it. And it’s solid. The parts I described above are the weakest bits, what some of the sites I referenced described as “the super-hero plot.” The stronger parts are the Brother staying with a white single mother with a biracial child, falling in love with a lounge singer, being protected by the bureaucracy of social services—the movie is endlessly inventive and never didactic. I never had a sense that it was trying to speak to any culture or group’s experiences, only these individual characters. Each of them has their own situation and is dealing with it in a way particular to them.

While the movie can be a little uneven—it does feel at times like an exceptional college film—it’s also hands-down one of the best movies I’ve seen while doing this project. Other movies have been fun, some are good in a goofy or nostalgic way, but this is the first one that really stands out for having style and ambition. The movie is trying something and is really sharp in its execution. Of course it’s a recommend. More than just being fun on a weekend, this film is deeply satisfying.

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