‘The Annihilation of Fish’ Review: A Gem That’s Worth the Wait

Obediah Johnson — the lost-and-found soul played by a magnificent James Earl Jones in “The Annihilation of Fish” — has a barrel chest and a voice that sounds like it emerged, warmed and polished, from unfathomable depths. It’s an instrument that many know from “Star Wars” and “The Lion King,” in which Jones voiced two of the most totemic fathers in movies. Yet the eloquence of his basso profundo was also instrumental in lesser-known works like “Annihilation,” Charles Burnett’s deeply humane, singular view from the margins that is receiving a theatrical release 26 years after its first public screening at a film festival.

It seems shocking that it’s taken this long for the film to hit theaters given Burnett’s elevated standing; his masterful “Killer of Sheep” (1978) is a milestone in American cinema and his reputation long established. There are a number of reasons that “The Annihilation of Fish,” his fifth feature, didn’t reach the world earlier. Among other things, genuine independent filmmaking, the kind that transcends formula and expectations and comes without corporate sponsorship, has always been difficult to market. And Burnett, whose filmography includes “To Sleep With Anger” (1990), a neo-Gothic tale about a Southern interloper that slips between drama and comedy, has always defied compartmentalization. He can’t be pigeonholed.

“The Annihilation of Fish” similarly evades classification, genre and otherwise. The movie is often gently funny, though occasionally lurches into boisterous excess, with jolts of slapstick and glints of ticklish nonsense. At the same time, there’s a strong current of melancholy running throughout the story, which complicates and occasionally destabilizes its comedy. There are moments here when you laugh but aren’t sure if you should, and instances when you wonder (and worry) if you’re laughing with the characters or at them, and whether it matters. Most movies prompt you about when it’s time to laugh and to cry; not this one.

Written by Anthony C. Winkler, the film tells the tale of Obediah — he goes by Fish — a Jamaican immigrant who’s long lived in a mental facility in New York and claims to be bedeviled by an invisible demon he calls Hank. The demon pops up unexpectedly, as imps tend to do, and Fish keeps him in check by wrestling him. They’re grappling in church soon after the movie opens, a tussle that ends with Fish being abruptly ousted from his group home. “It was like Pearl Harbor,” he protests to a functionary, “sneak attack!” No matter. Soon, he is out the door with his suitcase and headed West, where his story begins in earnest.

Fish ends up in that vexed paradise known as Los Angeles, where he moves into a modest, dilapidated apartment building run by a friendly eccentric, Mrs. Muldroone (a winning Margot Kidder). With its lush garden and stained, peeling interior, the building is the sort of place you can imagine the likes of Nathanael West and David Lynch making poetically dark use of. By contrast, Fish settles in with the pragmaticism of someone who must make do with what little life has afforded him: He spruces up his new apartment, transforming squalor into a home. Not long after, he meets Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave).

The trickiest character in the movie, Poinsettia is introduced sometime before she and Fish meet; you know she’s important to his story from how Burnett cuts between them, like an anxious matchmaker. A loud, aggressively flamboyant figure given to voluble yowling and mewling, Poinsettia lives in San Francisco and claims to be in a relationship with the invisible and very dead Giacomo Puccini, a fixation that involves some strained comedy. Things improve when she too leaves for Los Angeles (before she does, Burnett tucks in an allusion to “Vertigo,” a classic of mad love), where she moves into the apartment across from Fish’s.