Charles Burnett. James Naremore
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plot contains a good deal of stylized comic satire, almost like a socially edgy TV sitcom, and ends in the disruption of the brother’s wedding. Burnett crosscuts between the two plots in the closing scenes, when Soldier’s funeral is held at the same time as the brother’s wedding and Pierce’s divided loyalties, one based on an old friendship and the other on a sense of obligation, come into stark conflict. He’s forced to make a decision, but he waits too long, abandoning the wedding only to arrive too late at the funeral. The mood that results is less tragicomedy than bitter frustration or ironic deflation of two kinds of narrative, one associated with tragedy and the other with comedy.
In a 1988 interview with Monona Wali of the Independent, Burnett described the film as the story of a young man who “romanticizes the poor for the wrong reasons” and “hates the middle class for the wrong reasons.” Pierce, he said, “is an accident waiting to happen” (Kapsis 2011, 20). He isn’t a bad person, although he’s having an affair with a young married woman who meets him in the evenings, her entrances backed by the sexy, nondiegetic music of Johnny Ace’s 1955 recording, “Anymore.” In fact, Pierce has admirable qualities. He’s an intelligent, responsible worker, and most of his daily life involves dashing back and forth to help others: he runs errands for his mother; changes a baby’s diaper; and babysits for “Big Mamma and Big Papa” (Cora Lee Day and Tim Wright), his aged grandparents. We see him unzipping his grandfather’s pants to help him pee, taking the old man’s clothes off to bathe him, shining his shoes, giving his grandmother her daily pills, and reading to both of them from their Bible. On the eve of Soldier’s release from prison, he not only tries to comfort Soldier’s parents but also tries to get Soldier a job. First, he goes to a liquor store manager, who tells him, “If you wanted a job, yeah,” but nixes the idea of Soldier. He then goes to a local mechanic and carefully leads up to asking a favor by remarking, “You know, Soldier’s getting out of jail.” Without pausing in his work, the mechanic says, “That’s too bad. That’s one fellow they should keep in jail till he rots.”
Pierce’s chief flaws are immaturity and bad judgment, especially in regard to Soldier (Ronald E. Bell), the only person in the film around whom he seems happy. On the day when Soldier is released from prison, Pierce, who has been delayed because of his attempts to find his friend a job, runs breathlessly down a crowded street to a bus station, where he finds Soldier standing outside in a dark suit and two-toned shoes, holding a paper bag filled with his belongings and checking his watch. There are many scenes involving running in My Brother’s Wedding; a guiding metaphor of the film, Burnett has explained, is “running blindly” or rushing into life without “wisdom” (Kapsis 2011, 20). The two men almost collide and shout with joy and laughter as they punch each other like kids.
In a subsequent homecoming, Pierce stands by while Soldier embraces his mother and father and promises that he’s returned to stay. The scene is poignantly staged, with Soldier’s back to the camera as he holds his weeping mother for a few moments and then walks toward his father, offering to shake hands and accepting a tight hug. But on the same evening, while Pierce is eating dinner with his parents, a man named Walter (Garnett Hargrave) knocks at the door and calls him outside. In the back seat of Walter’s car, another man is moaning in pain, his face bruised and bloody. “Look, what your friend did,” Walter says. “Your friend is sick. Sick! Tell him I’m looking for him, to kill him.”
This encounter has no apparent effect on Pierce, who, whenever Soldier is around, behaves more like a teenager than a man of thirty. Burnett shows the two running wildly and happily down the streets in sun and rain, not unlike the kids in Killer of Sheep. They race one another and engage in an impromptu wrestling match, falling and breaking the front fence of a house on Chico Street, where the homeowner comes out with a gun and chases them away. They stand in an alleyway at night and harmonize with a doo-wop tune. When their singing ends, Soldier turns to Pierce and asks, “Where is everybody?” Pierce solemnly replies that there’s “just you and me.” Their closest childhood friends have presumably left the neighborhood or died young.
In the early 1980s Watts was changing from the relative innocence depicted in Killer of Sheep to something more deadly, precipitated by the rising drug trade. Looked at alongside Killer, the neighborhood in this film seems comparatively urban, colorful, and in some ways prosperous, but guns are becoming more evident. When Mrs. Mundy sends Pierce to retrieve a kitchen pot from his aunt Hattie (Jackie Hargrave), we see the aunt putting down a big glass of vodka and picking up a gun before she answers the door. A couple of thieves armed with a knife try to rob the Mundy dry-cleaning shop, and Mrs. Mundy reaches for a gun beneath her front counter, forcing them to run down the street to their car. Inside the car, a heavily drugged man and woman discuss going back to the shop; when the man grabs a pistol, the woman tells him in slurred speech to keep it away from “my baby,” and Burnett tilts the camera down to reveal that she’s holding an infant in a child’s car seat. Later Walter, who warned Pierce that he intended to kill Soldier, aims a gun at Pierce and Soldier as they walk down the street in broad daylight. He pulls the trigger, but the gun doesn’t work. Soldier draws a knife, and a chase ensues down Arlington Avenue and into a couple of alleyways, the overweight gunman barely escaping Pierce, who has found a club.
The scenes involving Soldier are neorealist in style, but the scenes involving the family and the dry-cleaning business are often humorous. Burnett felt that the humor in Killer of Sheep had been too “dry” and insufficiently noticed, and he set out to make it more evident in this film, in the process creating a kind of dialectic between realism and social comedy. Pierce’s father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Mundy (Dennis Kemper and Jessie Holmes, the latter an especially fine performer), are vivid character types: a hard-working, salt-of-the-earth couple from the South who have done a good job of raising their two sons and are devoted to the local Baptist church. She’s a thickset matriarch with a big voice and a pronounced drawl, and he’s a small, dapper man who is feeling his age. Mrs. Mundy is disappointed by Pierce’s aimlessness but ecstatic over the fact that her oldest son, Wendell (Monte Easter), has become a successful lawyer and is about to marry into a wealthy family.
The forthcoming marriage is a prime source of comedy and satire, but so is the dry-cleaning business, which provides a window onto the local culture. Silas amusingly performs Pierce’s not-quite-deadpan reactions to a cross-section of folks who appear at the front counter of the dry-cleaning store. Among them is Mr. Bitterfield (Ross Harris), a fat man with a pipe in his mouth who continually mutters to himself and expects Mrs. Mundy to work miracles on a pair of “churchgoing” trousers massively ripped apart at the crotch. (Mrs. Mundy decides to pretend she’s worked a miracle and give Bitterfield a pair of unclaimed pants.) Another fellow shows up and can’t remember what name he used when he brought in his clothes. “Could have used the name of Bob Walker,” he says. Pierce consults the books and can’t find that name. In the past, he tells the customer, “You used the name of Jack Ace.” The customer shakes his head. “Look under the name of Korn,” he says. Exasperated, Mrs. Mundy tells him, “I’m tired of trying to keep track of all your aliases!” In still another scene, Angela, the girl who has a crush on Pierce, appears wearing a close-fitting dress and relatively high heels. “In a couple of years, I have my prom,” she tells Pierce. “I was thinking. . . . If you weren’t busy . . .” When Pierce doesn’t respond, she announces that she’s going to a Smoky Robinson concert. Mrs. Mundy, in the back of the shop, hears this and steps to the counter to remark, “I would think you’d be home watching Howdy Doody.” Angela holds her abdomen as if she is having a period and complains that it’s uncomfortable being a woman.
A repeated gag involves a zany but affectionate wrestling match that keeps popping up between Pierce and his father, amusing because Pierce is tall and skinny and his father short and a bit stocky. Early in the film Pierce initiates a battle by lightly slapping his father on the back of his head. They start to tussle, and Mrs. Mundy shouts, “You two act your age!” The father gets Pierce in a hammerlock and starts pulling him toward the back door. “Son,” he says, “never underestimate an old man!” At this point a sad-faced but dignified fellow appears at the front of the shop and tells Mrs. Mundy that he’s looking for work. “No,”