1984’s The Brother from Another Planet is a smart, funny, smallscale sci-fi movie about an alien who crashlands in New York. In some respects it’s a sibling movie to 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth – weird dude with special gifts has a mixed time of it on planet Earth.
Because the alien resembles a black man, the movie is often seen as some gigantic metaphor for the black experience in the USA but beyond the fact of the dude’s alienness, it’s a reading that doesn’t yield much more than the movie on a surface level is already delivering.
It goes about its business as a series of slice-of-life vignettes about daily existence. The “Brother”, as Joe Morton’s character is billed, lands in the Hudson River in a space craft we don’t see, having lost one of his three-toed feet on the way to Earth. After a bit of regenerative waving of his hand, he hobbles into a bar, where an initially sceptical but eventually rather supportive clientele take him under their wing. He cannot speak, which endears him to them, he also seems harmless, and when he sits on a barstool on which someone once died, he reacts instantly to the vibe. This impresses the gang.
What also impresses them is the Brother’s ability to fix broken electronics with a waft of his alien hand. He soon has a job, fixing broken arcade games, and with it enough money to stretch out a little – he has an eye for women, and a fading soul singer played by Dee Dee Bridgewater in particular.
Jeopardy comes in the form of two men in black (white men, played by David Strathairn and writer/director John Sayles himself) combing Harlem to try and find the Brother, in a plot development to an extent foreshadowing Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. There’s also the everyday jeopardy of the street – drugs, muggers and assorted bad guys – to contend with.
What Brother from Another Planet most resembles is Ice Cube’s Friday movies (he wrote and starred) and it’s at its best in the almost-empty bar where bar owner Odell (Steve James), resident sage Walt (Bill Cobbs), video-game jockey Fly (Daryl Edwards) and resident drunk Smokey (Leonard Jackson) chew the fat and pass the time in scenes that are beautifully written and played.
Morton, though not speaking, also plays the lead role sympatheticaly, making the Brother a smart but wet-behind-the-ears avatar for the immigrant experience. Wiser than he looks, with skills many will not notice.
Could it be made today, what with Sayles being a white man and this being a black movie and all that? Possibly, and the fact that there’s a sci-fi element would help, but social media would undoubtedly get steamed up about the racial politics, but then when doesn’t it?
It also helps that it’s pretty cute, low of key and not making too many grand claims. Sayles financed it largely himself. He’s had a strange, twin-track career, writing Hollywood genre movies like Alligator and Piranha in order to pay the bills and make more personal movie like this. Even so, that doesn’t mean this is an out-there indie movie.
It’s full of Hollywood touches – Sayles, let’s remember, wrote the screenplay that ET was eventually based on. You wouldn’t describe it as the most dramatic of movies – those men in black notwithstanding – but it’s a good looking movie considering the budget. The DP is Ernest Dickerson, who’d do great work on Spike Lee movies like Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X before switching over to directing.
A curio. Amiable. Far less hard-hitting than you might expect. A few more superhero movies like this wouldn’t go amiss.
The Brother from Another Planet – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
