Northwest Film Center is paying homage to director John Sayles, showing Brother from Another Planet and Return of the Secaucus Seven. In Brother from Another Planet, Joe Morton stars as a man that travels across the cosmos to escape the bonds of slavery, only to end up on Earth and have to make it without a home, money or even shoes on his three-toed feet. The alien is taken into a boarding house where he befriends a mother and child.
He takes the child to a tolerance museum where he points out that, back on his home planet, he was a slave.
Later, he dabbles with drugs, falls in love and goes E.T. on some broken pinball machines and a scraped knee. Ultimately, his former captors come looking for him and the hunt begins.
Sayles puts out some lofty concepts in this 109-minute feature. Outright, he attempts to tackle intolerance by not-so-subtly disguising it in the fact that the alien that is being pursued has three toes and is referred to as such by his former owner, providing that the character’s number of digits is akin to our racial profiling determined by color of skin.
Aside from the overtly thematic points in the film, Sayles also attempts to be visually artistic throughout. Clever cinematography, editing (also done by Sayles) by chopping scenes up into small vignettes and adding a very brief subplot that barely comes across as the alien tries to save Harlem from a drug kingpin (one can only assume this, since the scene itself it less than three or four minutes and barely plays itself out).
Unfortunately for Sayles, he was attempting to throw too many things at the audience. In such a short amount of time everything just fell apart.
In Return of the Secaucus Seven, Sayles made his directorial debut in a film about a group of friends that gather together to mark the 10-year anniversary of their arrest on the way to a protest in Washington, D.C. The film focuses on the individual characters and the group’s reaction to their change in situation, ultimately bringing up a slew of old wounds and long forgotten desires. Much like Brother, the film was episodic and cut with many vignettes. Being attributed as the influence for the movie The Big Chill, Secaucus Seven won numerous prestigious awards and launched a genre of “reunion films” and television, exploring the baby boom generation growing old before its time and how it copes.
As a filmmaker, Sayles has had an interesting career. From working for B-movie magnate Roger Corman to director Bruce Springsteen music videos and writing the unmade Jurassic Park IV, Sayles has had an interesting ride. The Northwest Film center is definitely doing him justice in showcasing his two most ambitious works.