MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Wedding’: A Vision of Watts as Anywhere, U.S.A.

Filmmakers can change the way we view certain areas. That’s what Charles Burnett does with South-Central Los Angeles.

For Burnett, Watts, the site of “My Brother’s Wedding” (at the Monica 4-Plex), isn’t a terror-ridden urban jungle. It’s an everyday place where ordinary people lead ordinary--though sometimes agonizingly hard--lives: a realm of families and strife, friendship and conflict, work, hell-raising and, sometimes inevitably, death and grief.

This is a Watts sometimes steeped in absurdity, sometimes marrow-deep in rage. The film’s focal point is embittered Pierce Monday (Everett Silas), whose youth is about to die on him. Burnett traps Pierce between two worlds: the safe, settled, middle-class existence of his lawyer brother, about to wed another attorney; and the hell-bent revels of his boyhood best buddy, an ex-con.

The buddy, Soldier Richards (Ronnie Bell), like Danny Glover’s trickster uncle in Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger,” is trouble walking. But he’s also a symbol of rebellion against the thing that both repels and attracts Pierce: his brother’s comfort-laden, hypocritical life.

For Burnett, the choices are both tarnished. Wendell is smug (“He’s not retarded; he’s ghettoized,” he says of Pierce to his fiancee), while Soldier is live as a jump-wire, but a near-psychopath. As in “To Sleep With Anger,” Burnett encloses his thorny tale in biblical invocations, half-ironic suggestions of redemption and damnation.

There’s a brisk easiness to Burnett’s Watts. It’s both Anywhere, U.S.A., and an urban homeground of harsh specificity. And Burnett, a filmmaker who works in a determinedly low key, keeps focusing on the slight details that will sting it to life: a little girl’s somnolent, sassy flirting, the way an anguished father curls up on a plain bed, the sun hitting a bottle of vodka held inches off the floor.

Burnett doesn’t skimp on horror; his story includes attempted murder, chases, fights and violent deaths. He simply reduces horror to its actual position, a sudden dark eruption in lives that are, most of the time, concerned with earning a living, facing one’s family and friends, getting through the day--or one’s whole life--as best one can.

Burnett has made two low-budget independent classics in three tries as a fiction feature director: his marvelous 1977 “Killer of Sheep” and last year’s “To Sleep With Anger.” “My Brother’s Wedding,” made in 1983 but unreleased until now, is the third. It’s the least of his works. The movie, like Pierce, is trapped between two worlds: low-budget grit and a more verbally elegant style.

Perhaps inevitably, Burnett’s script is stronger than many of the shadings his amateur cast can give it. He’s chosen a very deliberate pace and some of his leads are awkwardly self-conscious throughout, mouthing their speeches as if for a commencement address. It’s not a universal flaw: Silas is quite good, many bit players are effective and memorable, and Bell, as Soldier, is dynamic.

Burnett, who wrote, directed, co-produced, photographed and edited “My Brother’s Wedding” (Times-rated Mature for language and sex), isn’t an obvious poet and he doesn’t obviously lyricize scenes. But the way he lingers on details, breaks off climaxes and enters the action halfway through, keeps us, like Pierce, in a state of suspension and anxiety. In the end, flaws and all, Charles Burnett’s Watts is a private moral battleground--with guns in the streets, good china on the supper table, all one’s old buddies gone or dead, and holy music and blues wafting through the trees.

‘My Brother’s Wedding”

Everett Silas: Pierce Mundy

Jessie Holmes: Mrs. Mundy

Gaye Shannon-Burnett: Sonia

Ronnie Bell: Soldier Richards

A Charles Burnett production. Director/writer/producer/cinematographer/editor Charles Burnett. Co-producer Gaye Shannon-Burnett. Music Johnny Ace, John Briggs. With Dennis Kemper, Sy Richardson. Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (sex, language, violence).