Fish and Poinsettia (James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave), the principal characters of Charles Burnett’s recently rediscovered The Annihilation of Fish (1999), hope relocating to L.A. will take off some of the weight of their problems. For the last decade, Fish has been stalked by a randomly appearing “demon” only he can see — an affliction for which he was committed to a psychiatric hospital he’s just been released from — and thinks that moving to the bustling city will give him an “advantage” over a creature who unpredictably appears for what amount to wrestling matches of which Fish is always the victor. Poinsettia, a lonely alcoholic with foiled opera-singer ambitions who’s been in a multi-year, imagined relationship with the long-dead composer Giacomo Puccini, goes to L.A. for a fresh start after her long-time-coming “breakup” with the latter.

As drawn up by screenwriter Anthony C. Winkler, Fish and Poinsettia are often funny. The grandiosity of Jones’ famed, royal-sounding baritone — which Burnett nonetheless told the actor to try toning down — inculcates everything his character does with a majesty that absurdly contrasts with his constant (and maybe too often interrupting) battles with dead air. And Poinsettia’s adoration of opera is so all-consuming that when she, early in the film, attends a performance of Madama Butterfly that sprawls throughout a public Japanese garden, she can’t help but sing along with the characters, to a degree that one of the performers temporarily stops warbling to shush her. 

Yet you never sense, in The Annihilation of Fish’s kooky strain of humor, that it’s making fun of its characters. When Fish at one point stoically asserts that “loneliness ain’t no laughing matter,” it also speaks to how the movie writ large sees its characters: as damaged, sympathetic people still dealing with the aftereffects of lives that have worn them down. Poinsettia’s suffering is particularly acute; she laments that all her ex-boyfriends — she’s never married or had kids, two things she desperately wanted — saw her as someone to beat up, not marry.

Margot Kidder in The Annihilation of Fish. All imagery courtesy of Kino Lorber.

The only relationship Poinsettia has been in where she wasn’t physically abused was when she was with her idealized version of Puccini. The Annihilation of Fish will see that hands-off romantic respite continue, just with someone else. She and Fish fall in love; they serendipitously move into the same boardinghouse, which is run by an eccentrically wise old woman named Mrs. Muldroone (a drily hilarious Margot Kidder, caked in old-age makeup) and get to know each other over cigarette smoke-ringed games of gin rummy. The purpose they give each other unsettles Fish at first. He’s for so long been accustomed to the idea that his mission in life is to protect the public from a demon with an appetite for looking up skirts that he’s not sure what to do when a corporal woman starts to take precedence. Poinsettia, who often passes out drunk outside Fish’s room, is in the meantime eager to give herself over to tangible love with a man she loves enough to humor his conviction that he’s being monstrously haunted. She starts acting as a “ref” whenever the beast, invisibly salivating for a fight, shows up.

Seeing two past-middle-age people romance each other, even in this idiosyncratic context, is touching. I demur, though, at now-common proclamations of the newly reappraised The Annihilation of Fish being a lost masterpiece. I love the intensity of James’ performance. Ditto Burnett’s many ravishing compositions, like the ones at the aforementioned Magnolia tree-cluttered Japanese garden; during a pink- and yellow-lit dancehall outing; or during a later moment when Fish and Poinsettia are out walking on the rain-slicked path alongside some water, a floral parasol-toting Poinsettia attempting to feed ducks as they stroll. 

But the movie seems conflicted about its seriousness. It’s empathetic to its characters, but Redgrave and Kidder’s performances, as entertaining as they are, feel so stage-comedy-ready that they don’t fully feel like real people the way Jones’ Fish does. But in a filmography as masterwork-laureled as the undersung Burnett’s is, a rescued lesser work is still a cause for celebration. He never goes for what’s expected — filters the interesting-enough world through movie clichés.