The Brother from Another Planet had me just from its pedigree alone: it’s a modest independent film that does more with what little it has than projects with a thousand times the budget. It was the fourth film by indie-movie maven John Sayles, and it remains among his very best simply because it takes one basic idea and sees it through without stumbling. It also works because it spans many different tones quite effortlessly — it’s broadly funny, touching, and thoughtful, sometimes all of those things at the same time. Lastly, it’s a New York movie — or, specifically, a Harlem movie — and it understands New York from the sidewalk on up.
Brother stars Joe Morton, an actor you have almost certainly seen many times before (he was the hot-shot computer scientist in Terminator 2, for instance), but he never played a role remotely like this before or since. He plays an alien from outer space, an escaped slave, who crash-lands on Earth just off of Ellis Island. He doesn’t seem all that different from a human being, except for the three toes on his feet, but he can heal with a touch and fix (or sabotage) machinery the same way. Morton plays the whole role with his eyes, face and body, since the being never speaks once. It is a great performance, because it forces us to actually look at the man, to take in his whole performance, instead of simply listen to him.
The "brother" is a mute alien slave who can heal machines and people at a touch,
and who crash-lands in Harlem as a fugitive — much as generations of immigrants before have.
People can’t help but find the alien fascinating. When he wanders into a bar in Harlem and sits down, one of the local drunks assumes he’s from Africa — or, worse, Polynesia. He finds work in a Times Square video arcade, fixing the machines by performing his laying-on-of-hands routine, and when people ask where he’s from, he simply points up. Clearly he understands what people say, even if he can’t reply, and when faced with such a person people bare themselves unexpectedly. There’s a truly funny scene in that vein, one of many in the film, where the woman who rents him a room indulges in a long, brassy monologue to him about her no-good lover.
What makes the film particularly wonderful is how it works on multiple levels at once without ever seeming to try. It was billed as both a science-fiction movie and a comedy, but it doesn’t really fit into either of those categories. The only other film I can think of that it resembles most is Being There, which was funny and insightful, and in the end chillingly profound in its implications. Brother works mainly, and best, as a parable about the immigrant experience, since the brother is the ultimate immigrant. He’s not from around here and doesn’t speak the language, but yet through the graces of others and persistence on his part, he makes good.
He eventually finds help through the good graces of others, who all see things in him
that might not be there but they find him all the more fascinating for that reason.
The other big strand of the movie is a running series of comic commentaries on race, which are observant and cutting without being cynical. One of the very funniest and most on-target scenes in the film has two alien bounty hunters (who look like geeky white guys) come into the bar where the brother was discovered. They are out of place, of course, but have no idea just how out of place, and they get into an argument with one of the regulars that is like something straight out of a classic Richard Pryor routine. Sayles has a parallel scene later on involving another couple of white guys looking for Columbia University campus, who sit down next to the brother in the bar and get drunk and pour their hearts out to him as he nods.
Some of the other elements aren’t as compelling — there’s a subplot about a cabaret singer that the brother becomes smitten with, for instance, and it works better in the details than it does as a whole (as in the way he “tells” her how he likes her singing). The last few scenes are also not what they could be; they feel much weaker and more amateurish compared to everything that came before (except for a wonderful concluding twist). What I like best, though, is how the movie finds immense beauty in the rough streets of the city. There is a lovely and sad sequence late in the film, a great example of this movie at its best, where the brother loses himself morosely in drugs and wanders the night streets in the company of a Rastafarian.
Even if the climactic scenes aren't as convincing as the rest of the film, Brother still
works wonders by dint of being well-observed and true to life in many other ways.
Sayles remains one of the best of directors, indie or not. When Brother was released Sayles had already made a name for himself with Lianna and Return of the Secaucus 7 and would later go on to further distinguish himself with Matewan, Passion Fish, Lone Star, The Secret of Roan Inish, Sunshine State and many other films. Sayles was himself a protégée of the master of low-budget filmmaking, Roger Corman, and many of the actors and crew in Sayles’s films went on to great things on their own as well. Here he uses, rather than is constrained by, a very small budget and a sometimes deliberately low-end look to tell exactly the story he wants, and it works.
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