‘The Annihilation of Fish' review: A rare James Earl Jones film, restored, returns for a victory lap

Chicago Tribune

21-03-2025

'The Annihilation of Fish' would be pretty much unimaginable, if it weren't here, now, a generation after its disappearance.
It barely got into production in 1999, even with James Earl Jones heading the cast. A Toronto International Film Festival screening later that year revealed the film's singular and divisive qualities, which led to one willing distributor to take on the release. Then a harsh Variety review, deriding its lack of commercial oomph, killed the deal and the movie hid away, in limbo.
Until now. Director Charles Burnett has admirers in high places, for the best possible reason: He's a pioneering poet of Black American life, and a singular cinematic talent working on his own wavelength, mixing his own mixture of joy and despair and tragedy and human comedy.
Burnett's 1978 independent classic 'Killer of Sheep,' a beautiful, battered page out of Los Angeles and Watts history, will never cease to cast its spell. Within the Hollywood studio system, despite its cautious oversight, Burnett made 'To Sleep With Anger' (1990), driven by Danny Glover's finest-ever performance, as well as the Walter Mosley/Denzel Washington noir 'Devil in a Blue Dress' (1995).
Burnett kept working, in film and television, fiction and nonfiction. This brings us to the unicorn of a project 'The Annihilation of Fish.' Thanks to a recent restoration funded by Mellody Hobson and George Lucas via their Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, this bracingly cockeyed comic romance has dropped in from the past, with Lynn Redgrave and Margot Kidder in memorable supporting roles. It opens in Chicago Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Wayfarer Theatre in Highland Park.
At first sight the three leading characters share little beyond a Los Angeles address, and a sense of dislocation. Jamaican American Obediah Fish has spent the last 10 years in a New York City psychiatric hospital; he's beset by an demon visible only to him, and this demon (Hank, by name) engages Fish in wrestling matches on a regular schedule.
Relocating to L.A., Fish lands in the boarding house owned by Mrs. Muldroone (Kidder), who, like Fish, is a solo act, having lost her spouse years ago. She's a weed tender. Everyone has their coping mechanisms in this comic construct, protected the characters from everyday reality.
This surely applies to the Puccini-loving Poinsettia (Redgrave), whose love of grand opera and Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly' in particular goes beyond mere fandom. She spends much of her time communing with the late composer as if he were alive and her special beau. Not long after Fish moves to the boarding house, Poinsettia steps off a Greyhound bus from San Francisco, laden with suitcases, and promptly becomes Fish's neighbor.
Leading with flamboyant hostility and more than a little racism, this blowsy blur of a woman — in Redgrave's skillfully hammy hands, she's like every Mrs. Clackett in every production of 'Noises Off' put together — needs tending. A courtly soul, Fish is there for her, picking her drunken self up off the hallway floor after her latest night on the town.
This leads to a friendship over games of rummy. (Akin to 'The Gin Game,' which Jones performed on Broadway, much of 'The Annihilation of Fish' takes place over cards.) He cooks a Jamaican feast for her. And then love blooms, in between Fish's bouts with the unseen demon from his past, with Poinsettia serving as referee. The demon fades from view. But can Fish live without his adversary?
The screenplay comes from writer Anthony C. Winkler, who also wrote a short story by the same title. 'The Annihilation of Fish,' purely as material from which Burnett made his film, requires a certain amount of forgiveness and faith. Its coyness can get sticky.
But the actors reward every ounce of audience faith. Once Fish and Poinsettia lower their guards, the movie settles and Burnett's touch is beguiling, all the more for his sly intimations of the supernatural — at one point, Fish tosses the invisible demon Hank out his second-story apartment window, and we see the leaves on the tree shake and sway — and his soulful embrace of these broken but unbowed lives.
The movie's a rom-com at heart, but there is no other one like it. It's also as much of an L.A. story as every other Burnett film made there, and it does not shy away from 1999-era political issues, from President Reagan's de-institutionalization of countless mentally ill patients, to never-not-topical American subjects of race and prejudice. 'In South Africa, they used to put a white woman on bread and water for a year for kissing a Black man,' Fish says, after Poinsettia plants one on his kisser. Her response: 'Piss on South Africa.'
'The Annihilation of Fish' — 3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for some sexual content)
Running time: 1:48
How to watch: Starts March 21 at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago (www.siskelfilmcenter.org) and Wayfarer Theatres in Highland Park (www.wayfarertheaters.com).