My Brother's Wedding

Charles Burnett's 1983, My Brother's Wedding, conceived, it seems, as complementary to the director's poetic tour de force, Killer of Sheep, is a baffling, career-ending catastrophe.  It's the sort of failure that casts a harsh retrospective light on previous successes and, even, encourages them to be denigrated.  In concept, My Brother's Wedding, explores the aspects of life in Watts ignored, or slighted, in Killer of Sheep.  Killer of Sheep employs crowds of children as a kind of Greek chorus and commentary on the action; in My Brother's Wedding, elderly people play a similar role.  The African-American Church and religion played no role in Killer of Sheep; in My Brother's Wedding, religion is important -- people proselytize one another and demand to know whether friends and family members are "saved".  The characters in Killer of Sheep were poor, but imagined themselves to be middle-class.  In My Brother's Wedding, the characters are upwardly mobile and class conscious -- the conflict in the film is between two brothers, one of them a successful doctor marrying a lawyer, and the other, disdainfully said to be "ghettoized," still working menial jobs and hanging out with his disreputable friend, Soldier, a man just released from the penitentiary.  My Brother's Keeper is schematic and much more tightly focused than Killer of Sheep -- it has a clear narrative arc:  Pierce Mundy, a young man working at his parent's dry cleaning shop, resents his brother's success and his abandonment of his roots in south-central L.A.  Pierce is a helpful fellow -- people are forever ordering him around:  he bathes an elderly man and shines his shoes and allows Soldier to use his mother's dry cleaning emporium as a trysting place -- Soldier demands that Pierce bring him a "tall glass of water" when he is having sex with his girlfriend.  Pierce obliges and even puts ice in the water.  Everything in the film builds toward the wedding, an event that Pierce resents since his brother's fiancée, a self-satisfied lawyer, obviously disdains him.  There is a catastrophic dinner at the elegant home of the lady-lawyer's parents and, then, Soldier is killed in a car wreck.  Soldier's funeral is scheduled for the same afternoon as the wedding of Pierce's brother and Pierce manages to end up as both a pall-bearer and best man, indispensable to two simultaneous ceremonies happening twenty miles apart.  Desperately, he tries to attend both functions but ends up successfully appearing at neither -- caught between the two worlds, Pierce doesn't function adequately in either of them.  On paper, this sounds like a promising scenario and the film seems to be well, if obviously, written.  There are many interesting and lyrical touches -- an adolescent girl hangs around Pierce and, more or less, offers herself to him.  (He is too chivalrous to accept her offer).  The old men all think that the remedy to the pervasive crime in the ghetto is to make the young bucks spend ten hours a day picking cotton -- "at least 500 pounds a day," one old gent says.  Everyone is armed with hand guns and seems to be terrified of being robbed or mugged or worse; indeed, there are several attempted, but botched, robberies in the film.  Burnett doesn't reproduce the error that shelved Killer of Sheep -- that is, he doesn't lard the soundtrack with popular hits.  (Killer of Sheep couldn't be released commercially for 30 years because there was no money to acquire the rights to the songs.)  Nonetheless, he uses effective and atmospheric sound cues -- old hymns, African chants, obscure jazz tunes.  So what's wrong with the film?  The problem can be simply stated:  the acting is uniformly awful.  Almost no one behaves in a way that is plausibly realistic.  There is a lot of dialogue in this film and it is important to the action and the performers deliver their lines as if learned phonetically.  In Killer of  Sheep, most of the dialogue, erratically recorded in any event, is inaudible and the film functions best as a silent movie.  My Brother's Wedding is shot in good quality Technicolor and the sound-recording is technically proficient.  But every single line is delivered with false inflections to the point that the movie is almost unwatchably awful.  My Brother's Keeper serves as a stern reminder that good acting is essential to a film's success.