Pioneering indie Black filmmaker Charles Burnett, still active, but with a mere handful of features in a career dating back to the ‘70s, is at his most successful/most original/most sui generis in this unusual work. Acting & co-producing, Danny Glover, with the post-LETHAL WEAPON commercial clout to make it happen, stars as a courtly force of folkloric negative energy who blows in from out of town, an unknowing (or is it knowing?) destructive catalyst to the extended family he knew back when, who let him stay for a while. (A Mary Poppins from Hell?) Burnett, moving in close with deadpan comic effects and slow-burn payoffs (a bit too measured by the end) proves as good at pushing emotional buttons as Glover is. Sibling rivalries, a bad heart, forced revelations from corn liquor, conflicts between the ways of the church & folk wisdom superstitions; all happening in one middle-class suburban home. (The usual tropes of Urban Black cinema nowhere to be seen.) And being aware that Glover is a storm that will eventually blow itself out, in hilarious, rude, unexpected ways, doesn’t lessen the pleasing narrative shocks; Burnett not at all shy about these things. Yet while film and cast are generally wonderful (Mary Alice particularly fine as a wise, if exasperated wife & mother), you’ll see why it didn’t jump much past the Art House market to re-jigger Burnett’s eternally stalled career arc. You’d also be a fool to miss this piece of Magical Neo-Realism. There’s even a moral to take home with you: Never Leave Your Marbles On the Floor.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Burnett’s first feature, KILLER OF SHEEP/’77, as pure as SLEEP is messy. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/02/killer-of-sheep-1973released-in-77.html
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