My Brother’s Wedding (1983)

(On Cable TV, August 2022) One of the essential functions of the L.A. Rebellion movement wasn’t just keeping black cinema alive after blaxploitation or preparing it for its Spike Lee-driven renaissance in the late 1980s, but offering realistic portrayals of black characters and families in a decade where such things were uncommon elsewhere. Writer-director Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding is just a touch too ironic and contrived to qualify as fully realistic, but it does feature an aimless black man trying to balance his friendship with an ex-con with the demands placed on him by his brother marrying an upper-middle-class woman. Tensions come to a head rather late in the film, as the protagonist has to choose between a wedding and a funeral. It’s counterproductive to avoid discussing that My Brother’s Wedding is rough on the technical aspects—it’s clearly made on a shoestring budget by a raw director. The script has good ideas but struggles to smooth them out into a fluid narrative—the ending crisis comes crashing far too late in the film to allow for a fully developed dilemma or it demonstrably leading to solid character development. Many scenes either build up endlessly (the dinner sequence, for instance) or come and go without making a maximal impact. But if you can be indulgent in the moment-to-moment execution of the film, it does add up to something better than its individual parts: an honest, credible examination of a character in a bad situation, touching upon many larger issues and doing it in a way that finds an interesting middle ground between outright drama or comedy. (This is not a comic film by any measure, as reinforced by its ending, but it gets a few laughs and concludes on a giant irony.)  It’s a minor miracle that the film has survived—like many, many L.A. Rebellion films of the black interregnum, My Brother’s Wedding was shown a few times, then shelved for decades before being rediscovered, restored and enshrined in black cinema history.