Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish went on the festival circuit in 1999 but was panned and quickly forgotten. Kino Lorber has finally given it a wide release. It’d be nice to say that it’s a lost masterpiece—but I can’t do that. The movie’s a broad, schmaltzy, and overly cutesy parable about the redemptive power of film, quirkiness, and love, not necessarily in that order.
The bulk of Fish is set in a boarding house owned by Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder). Her two new aging tenants Fish (James Earl Jones) and Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave) suffer from delusions; Fish believes he’s periodically accosted by a demon who he must wrestle, and Poinsettia believes she has just broken off a torrid love affair with the ghost of opera composer Puccinni.
At first, Fish is annoyed by Poinsettia’s warbled off-key arias. Poinsettia mistrusts Fish because she’s more than a little racist. One night she passes out drunk in the hallway and he puts her on his couch to make her comfortable; when she wakes up she immediately accuses him of sexually assaulting her. He laughs it off with a quip about how he’s too old to sexually assault anyone, but she encourages Mrs. Muldroone to call the cops—no joke considering how encounters between the police and Black mentally ill men can end. (Muldroone stonewalls Poinsettia.)
Eventually, Poinsettia and Fish discover a mutual love of cards; Poinsettia agrees to referee Fish’s demon wrestling matches; Fish cooks Jamaican dinners for her, and the two fall in love. Jones and Redgrave are lovely actors who enjoy all the ham in the stagey script. They portray an interracial, elderly couple falling in love with sensitivity and grace—the sex scenes, in particular, are almost impossibly endearing.
Other aspects of the script are forced and glib. Poinsettia’s racism disappears as soon as she gets to know Fish, and it’s never alluded to again; certainly it isn’t presented as a problem in the relationship. The boat made painstakingly out of matches is accidentally and inevitably incinerated at a crucial point of emotional tension. Poinsettia puts on opera makeup at a crucial point of emotional tension. Mrs. Muldroone introduces herself by insisting that Fish and Poinsettia must never spell her name without the “e,” a quirky throwaway line that then turns into her entire personality, complete with a tragic backstory.
Perhaps the biggest problem though is that mental illness is treated as a plot point or a gag, not as an actual problem. Fish and Poinsettia’s delusions are less like hallucinations and more like games—or like little movies within the movie. Poinsettia casts herself in a great romance; Fish casts himself as an action hero, or the star of a sports drama. These are dreams which provide comfort but also must be overcome or transcended to move towards the happy ending or dream of the smaller indie romance film they’re in. It’s hard to forget while watching all the saccharine bombast unfold that Margot Kidder, who’s standing right there, did have a very serious bipolar mental illness which caused her and her loved ones great pain, and which she was not able to escape by leaving San Francisco for LA, nor by wrestling it and tossing it out a window.
There are two films here. One’s a uniquely and sensitively imagined September romance. The other’s a disability inspiration narrative with echoes of Rain Man or Awakenings, in which viewer empathy for the mentally ill or different provides catharsis and/or life lessons. The first could’ve been a great movie; the second, which ultimately wins out, is disappointing enough to border on the offensive.
Given the performers and to some extent the performances Burnett gets from them, I can’t say that the movie deserved to be buried for 26 years. There are many worse movies that get wide release; for that matter, there are many worse movies which are hits. But The Annihilation of Fish’s belated released doesn’t feel necessary either.