MOVIE REVIEW : A Magical, Mystical Tour of South-Central Los Angeles

Under the credits of Charles Burnett’s pungent and richly comic drama, “To Sleep With Anger” (at the Park Theater in San Diego), Gideon, the patriarch of his family, sits heavily on a chair, an old photograph of his mother behind him, a bowl of fruit on the table beside him. Suddenly tongues of flame envelop the fruit. As he gazes at us, twiddling his thumbs, more flames seem to lick out from Gideon’s vest and from the soles of his shoes. With these magical images, Burnett warns us: His story may have a conventional setting but don’t be deceived.

With his third feature, Burnett turns storyteller, reaching into myths and superstitions, suggesting that Danny Glover’s Harry Mention is something more than an insinuating old friend come to visit, that he may be a demon or the soul of the sharecropper South . . . or an old friend come to visit.

His boyhood friends are Gideon (Paul Butler) and his wife Suzie (Mary Alice), who may at first glance look like one of television’s idealized black middle-class families, well down the ladder from Bill Cosby’s well-off doctor, up a bit from Sanford and Son’s junk dealers. Don’t expect comic one-liners here, though; writer-director Burnett’s family is rooted and real and so is his intimate knowledge of their South-Central Los Angeles community. What he adds is a story-teller’s flair, a poet’s ear for speech and the almost mystical vision that infused his first two features, “Killer of Sheep” and “My Brother’s Wedding.”

Gideon, who’s been almost every kind of laborer, is now retired; soft-spoken Suzie, who has the tensile strength of steel, gives natural childbirth classes out of their house. Unexpectedly, her traditional skills of midwifery are in demand again with young, hip couples, black and white. In this solid, family-worn two-story house they have raised two sons, Junior and Babe Brother, now both married. Gideon’s vegetable garden and his chickens are out back; from next door come the sounds of the 7-year-old’s trumpet practice. The noise suggests that Wynton Marsalis can rest easy for a while, but even this racket carries with it a sense of continuity and acceptance.

The sons and their wives are different from each other as chalk and cheese. Bearded Junior (Carl Lumbly) and his pregnant wife Pat (Vonetta McGee), who works for the city’s poor and homeless, are as warm and closely knit as their parents.

Weakling second son Babe Brother (Richard Brooks), a loan officer, and his realtor-wife Linda (Sheryl Lee Ralph) are quintessential buppies, to whom Gideon and Suzie’s ways are hopelessly old-fashioned. Linda declines even to come inside her in-laws’ house, since no one will be talking about anything that interests her. It doesn’t keep them, however, from parking their little boy Sonny with his grandparents constantly, so that these young parents can be with friends more to their liking.

All this is disrupted the day the smiling, perspiring Harry Mention appears at the family door on his way, he says, to Oakland. Originally from the Old South, he’s steeped in Old Country courtliness--and superstitions. Inadvertently, young Sonny keeps Harry at bay by touching his feet with a broom, an act with dire consequences to the deeply superstitious.

Instantly welcomed, Harry takes over like kudzu. The family sees only one side; we see Harry going through their photographs, their drawers, their sugar bowl when they’re at church. Humbly, he prefers a pallet on the floor to the bed they offer; soon his long-winded cronies have the run of the house. In spite of his Spartan ways, his talk about knowing his place, his tainted praise for everyone’s achievements, Harry seems to be the master of mischief. In his wake, the already-fragile family splinters dangerously.

The first person to see through him completely is the devoutly “born-again” Hattie (Ethyl Ayler), a beauty whom he knew in her wilder days. Harry takes malevolent pleasure in reminding her of those days, suggesting how easily--and how pleasurably--she could slip back into them.

Although mystery is part of Harry’s aura, we’re never quite sure of his powers, or even if he has any. It makes us worry when weaklings like Babe Brother fall in with him; on the other hand, it gives a delicious sense of comeuppance to the scene in which the serene Suzie speaks her mind to him. If Harry is a mythic force, he’s a strangely vulnerable one.

Glover gets straight down into the soul of Harry with a generous, brilliantly detailed performance, never over by so much as one broom straw. It’s his best character since “Places in the Heart” and one that gives him far more to play; as he casts light on every corner of Harry’s soul, Glover creates gradations from obsequiousness to lordliness to mocking insinuation.

He is joined by a ferociously good cast, and although all of them are wonderful, Paul Butler, Mary Alice and the forthright Ethyl Ayler seem to stand out.

When he is putting small, perfect touches on seemingly minor characters like Hattie or Harry’s bandy-legged, feisty cronies, like Okra Tate, Burnett’s writing is rich and briskly unexpected. It becomes shockingly hilarious in the movie’s final scenes, as the brisk wind of farce blows through the film, scouring away all demons.

Charles Burnett has been Los Angeles’ open secret since 1977 with “Killer of Sheep,” his hauntingly empathetic black-and-white study of a slaughter-house worker. The film was among 25 titles selected last week for protection as film treasures in the Library of Congress. In the interim, Burnett has painstakingly crafted his unique portraits of the immediate world around him; writing, directing, sometimes photographing them himself (“sex, lies, and videotape’s” Walt Lloyd was his splendid cameraman here).

“To Sleep With Anger” (rated PG) is Burnett’s first film with all-professional actors, his first color feature and his first film to receive major distribution. Among its other virtues, it seems to reaffirm William Faulkner’s soft-spoken sentiment that one’s own ground can be the richest, most inexhaustible soil possible.

‘TO SLEEP WITH ANGER’

An Edward R. Pressman production in association with SVS Inc. Producers Caldecot Chubb, Thomas S. Byrnes, Darin Scott. Executive producers Edward R. Pressman, Danny Glover, Harris E. Tulchin. Director, screenwriter Charles Burnett. Camera Walt Lloyd. Editor Nancy Richardson. Production design Penny Barrett. Music Stephen James Taylor. Costumes Gaye Shannon-Burnett. Art director Troy Myers. Sound Veda Campbell. With Danny Glover, Paul Butler, Mary Alice, Carl Lumbly, Vonetta McGee, Richard Brooks, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Ethyl Ayler, Julius Harris, Sy Richardson, Davis Roberts.

Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG (suggestion of violence in one scene; no offending language).