Written and Directed by Charles Burnett

 

Charles Burnett’s first film, Killer of Sheep, was shot in 1977 while he was still in film school at UCLA. He made it on weekends with no budget and no-name actors, but it went on to be included in the National Film Registry in 1990, recognized as a visionary, “realist” look at the previously invisible lives (as far as movies went) of people in the poorer areas of South Central Los Angeles. 1990 was also the year his second directorial effort premiered at Sundance: To Sleep With Anger, also set in South Central. The film stars Danny Glover as Harry, a mysterious, charming acquaintance who drops in on Gideon and Suzie’s peaceful family in south central LA; Harry--as Vincent Canby put it--is also “the soul of the Southern black sharecropper, come to haunt these gentle folk for whom the past is fondly and painlessly remembered in terms of ethnic foods, gospel music and methods of farming.” Harry also just may be a murderer. His presence wakes old ghosts and provokes deeply seated animosities…and it’s all done with a nervous humor born of his apparently easy-go-lucky spirit, and the fact that you just don’t know where the story is going to take you. To Sleep With Anger made a big splash when it came out, but now seems to have been largely forgotten, and that’s a shame. The Sundance website lists it as their number-one overlooked Sundance film. It’s a treasure.

 

To Sleep With Anger isn't playing by the same rules as most Hollywood productions. It’s first of all a Morality Play, invoking the same sense of simplicity and archetype as early, didactic drama. It is also an ethnic film, which is to say that it explores a reality that is out of the mainstream, on its own terms. Much of its pleasure comes from the fact that everything at first seems normal and mainstream--the middle class houses, the cars, the telephones and jobs--but in fact there is a deeper, mysterious truth to these people's lives that is rooted in the past, in the dark soil of the south, in the "negro experience" and a past that has roots not in Europe, but in Africa and the Caribbean. There is the fusion of Southern Baptist Christianity and African tribal magic, of a community flourishing apart from a larger society that has brutalized and ignored it. And, it is a story rich with mythic energy, drawn from a variety of sources.

 

Everything in the film plays to these contrasting elements. The family is deeply religious, and yet Gideon frets over the loss of his "toby," a charm given to him by his grandmother, and Suzie uses magical herbs to heal him when he’s wounded. Christian faith cannot replace such "old-fashioned" remedies, since Christianity--the white man's religion, after all--does not deal with the other, unrelated chaotic forces within the African American heart. Harry is that troubled heart’s personification, or at least its shadow side; the other characters are there as foils, and therefore not as fully rounded as Harry--we see anger in Gideon, but never doubt or suspicion. He is a true innocent. We only see justice and firm love in Suzie, never anger. We see Okra and the parade of Harry's friends almost as personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins--foolish and comic characters with the old Morality Plays. And we see the elemental “Cain and Abel” struggle in the relationship of Junior and Baby Brother, one who "cultivates the earth," and one who roams with the herds. But instead of allowing Cain to kill Abel, Suzie--a Madonna if ever there were one--intervenes. The Old Testament gives way to the New. This black Madonna sees her continuity in the little girl in the hospital, who will, in her day, have to bind and support her men, such as Sonny, when he grows up and in whom, as in the men, we see both goodness and the attraction of mischief.

 

You can compare this film with another archetypal drama: Euripides' The Bacchae. In that ancient Greek religious drama, a solid, commonsense “western” community is invaded by a mysterious presence from the East in the form of Dionysus, the god of wine, nature and madness. At first attractive and sensual, Dionysus soon proves to be a disruptive and chaotic force. The leader of the community rebels against him, denies his power, attempts to imprison him and is then torn limb from limb by the members of his own family under the ecstatic and vengeful sway of the god. The dark, primal side of life enters and destroys the carefully constructed logic of the city, just as vines enter the cracks of a wall and eventually tear it to pieces.

 

Here we have a similar story: Harry enters, and at first his earthy “truths” and fantastic stories of the past seem quaint and reassuring. But what he truly represents is the magic of the wild, the untamed and ever-restless heart, which denies structure and tears at the social web of the community. Harry is a kind of black Dionysus, full of sexual desire and wanderlust. He relishes games of chance, and both believes in and fears the dark forces because he himself is an expression of their reality.

 

His hosts are protected, as they are not in The Bacchae, by the presence of another spiritual member among them--Suzie--who understands and believes in the magic, too. She is aware where others are blind, and can use the benign aspects of nature to defeat the destructive. She invokes feelings and magic just as powerful and primal as Harry's: mother love, contact with the forces of growth and cultivation, insight into the lust of men. Ultimately, since she is rooted where Harry is rootless, her magic prevails through the agency of her grandson, the force of innocence.

 

In Greek mythology both Dionysus, the god of intoxication, madness and ecstasy, and Apollo, the God of order, reason and beauty, are associated with music. And in this film, music serves both masters. At first, there is no music other than the discordant trumpet of the young boy, which suggests a world not yet in order. When Harry arrives, poking his nose into the memorabilia of the family, a new music enters the picture, haunting and whimsical. Later, the music of order overcomes Harry's with the force of Hattie's hymnals, a higher, more socialized music. And ultimately a new music sounds: the boy learns to play his trumpet. Gideon (in the Bible a trumpet-player) is returned to life and prevails.

 

To Sleep With Anger is one of the richest and most thoughtful (and entertaining) independent films to come out of the ‘90s. Part realist look at a single African American family, part Biblical parable, and part Greek tragedy, it’s not like any movie you’ve ever seen. And that’s why it’s this month’s movie you gotta see, if only for what I consider to be the best performance of Danny Glover’s career. Glover is simply wonderful as the multidimensional, almost Shakespearean Harry, full of fun and full of danger. He is, like Falstaff, a descendent of the ancient Lord of Misrule, another Morality Play mainstay. As when in the Henry IV plays Shakespeare’s other characters seem gravitationally tethered to Falstaff's irrepressible, global life force, in this film the other characters also circle Harry's flame, attracted, repelled, singed or saved from its fatal light. (Spoiler Alert: stop reading now if you haven’t seen it!) As with Falstaff, Harry’s light only proves fatal to himself. At the end, he lies like a sacrifice, a tribal scapegoat in their midst, carrying away their sins and allowing order and harmony to return. The community slowly reassembles around him, wondering at his death, but ultimately ignoring it to go out, leave him behind, and rejoin society.