The Romantic Return of ‘The Annihilation of Fish’

Valentine’s Day is upon us once again. Some familiar movie titles will pop up in that holiday context: When Harry Met Sally… (and/or most of the Nora Ephron catalog), Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (less so Before Midnight), maybe even a vintage screwball comedy like Frank Capra’s 1934 classic It Happened One Night. Here in New York City, however, starting on February 14, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is presenting a two-week theatrical run of a potential new entry in the Valentine’s Day movie canon: a 1999 film you probably haven’t heard of titled The Annihilation of Fish.

That’s admittedly a rather unsexy name for a film whose theatrical release, in a new 4K restoration from independent distributor Milestone Films, is significant for reasons more than just romantic. For one thing, the release amounts to nothing less than the unearthing of a film previously thought lost. Though it had secured a distributor before making its world premiere at the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival, one damning review in Variety out of the festival led that distributor to cancel its theatrical release, and no other company swooped in to pick it up. Since then, it has only appeared in the context of one-off screenings; I made my first acquaintance with it back in 2011 during a series at the Museum of Modern Art film devoted to its director, Charles Burnett.

Burnett is another reason for the significance of this theatrical run, since he is one of America’s finest filmmakers. Those who know him at all will probably have seen his 1978 debut feature, Killer of Sheep, a gritty yet lyrical low-budget slice-of-life drama about working-class Black Americans in Los Angeles that got a much-celebrated restoration and re-release in 2007 (also courtesy of Milestone Films). The closest he has come since then to making a mainstream film was his 1994 cop drama The Glass Shield, which featured Ice Cube in a supporting role . Otherwise, he has mostly stuck to his independent bona fides, sporting a filmography ranging from documentaries to TV movies in addition to feature films, many of them highlighting different aspects of African and African-American history.

The pedigree of The Annihilation of Fish might make it seem slighter than the likes of Killer of Sheep or his folkloric 1990 fable To Sleep with Anger. It’s essentially a romantic comedy, albeit with an older man and woman, both of whom have extreme oddities of their own. Obediah “Fish” Johnson (James Earl Jones) lives under the delusion that his purpose in life is to wrestle a demon; the fact that he often acts out this belief in public led to a decade-long institutionalization. Flower “Poinsettia” Cummings (Lynn Redgrave) believes she’s carrying on an affair with long-dead Italian composer Giacomo Puccini. She tearfully decides to end the relationship, however, which is what leads her to flee from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where she shacks up in a boarding house owned by Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder) and encounters the recently de-institutionalized Fish.

The whimsy quotient in that set-up certainly sounds off the charts. But Burnett, working from a finely nuanced screenplay by Anthony C. Winkler, is too much of a humanist to view these characters as mere repositories of quirk. Instead, the three actors dig deeply into the melancholy underlying their characters’ surface eccentricities. You could see the Jamaican immigrant Fish’s obsession with wrestling a demon as a manifestation of the feeling of obsolescence that sprouted up after his retirement from being a janitor in New York City.

Poinsettia’s own fixation on Puccini stems from the trauma of an abusive relationship; it’s telling that she finds herself drawn to his classic opera Madama Butterfly, itself centering on a Japanese geisha wronged by an American soldier who woos, marries, but then abandons her. And though Mrs. Muldroone, obsessed with a weed that grows in her garden that he claims felled her husband, is a mere observer of the tempestuous romance that results between Fish and Poinsettia, she herself bears the psychological scars of a troubled marriage (the extra “e” at the end of her last name was, she explains, an attempt to wrest some agency from a relationship in which she possessed little of it).

By refusing to condescend to these characters and locating inner psychological truths, Burnett allows even these characters’ strangest actions to resonate with genuine emotional consequence. Another director, for instance, might have played Poinsettia’s decision to shoot the unseen demon tormenting Fish for pure screwball comedy. Instead, we find ourselves fully understanding Fish’s unexpectedly disappointed reaction to her action: For all her good intentions, she has destroyed his reason for being. Plus, how refreshing to see a filmmaker take a romance between two elderly people seriously instead of playing it for grotesque comedy.

One of the reasons many of us go to the movies is to give us an opportunity to step into the lives and mindsets of people whose experiences might differ greatly from our own. If, in films like Killer of Sheep and To Sleep with Anger, Burnett opened fascinating and affecting windows to the working-class African-American experience, The Annihilation of Fish finds this master tapping into a similar empathetic vein in a wholly different yet equally moving way. If love is something that Valentine’s Day celebrates, then I can think of no better way to do so than in the company of a film as overflowing with warmth and sincere romantic feeling as this one.