The Brother from Another Planet (1984)

Alongside his scripts for low-budget genre favourites like Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1981), Lewis Teague’s Alligator (1980) and Jimmy T. Murakami’s space opera Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), John Sayles was developing a strand of more serious-minded and critically lauded films that he directed himself like Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), Lianna (1983) and Baby It’s You (1983). The two strands crossed over in The Brother from Another Planet, a picaresque satire that brings Joe Morton’s black alien to Harlem and uses him to explore the lives, dreams and hopes of urban black Americans in the mid-1980s.

A black, three-toed alien (Joe Morton) arrives on Earth, his ship landing on Ellis Island (at one time New York’s busiest immigration facility). In the crash, the alien – who is never named, simply referred to by others as “brother” and who never speaks, metaphor for the voicelessness of black America – loses a leg but by rubbing his glowing hands over the wound he eventually grows a new one. He has other powers too – he can touch an object and feel the people who touched it in the past and with his magic healing hands he can bring broken video games consoles back to life. When he first arrives the alien wanders through eerily deserted streets that suddenly burst into noisy, chaotic life in the blink of an eye, though almost everyone ignores this strange, shambling and confused figure at first.

He wanders into a bar run by Odell (Steve James, taking a break from the action films he was associated with at the time) and befriended by the initially baffled customers. A sympathetic social worker, Sam (Tom Wright) finds him a place to live with Randy Sue (Carolyn Aaron), the wife of a black client and her young son Little Earl (Herbert Newsome) – she’s from Alabama and as out of place in Harlem as the alien – and the “brother” sets out to explore his new surroundings, finding work repairing games machines in a Times Square arcade, meeting a talented magician (Fisher Stevens) on the subway (his offer to show the alien how to make all the white people disappear is a clever way to subtly introduce the theme of racial segregation still rife in the States and elsewhere) and falling in love with a jazz singer (Dee Dee Bridgewater) and generally winning over everyone whose path he crosses. And all the while he’s being pursued by two very strange (and very white) Men in Black (David Strathairn and Sayles himself)…

The Brother from Another Planet is a film with a tiny budget (Sayles part-funded it using some of the money he was awarded as a grant by the MacArthur Fellows Program) but big ideas. It’s sometimes let down by Sayles tendency to abandon the parts of the film that worked the best (just standing back and observing the people of Harlem going about their daily business) and focusing instead on the comedy Men in Black and the anti-drugs message which feels a little crow barred in.

Where it does score is in the kaleidoscopic series of encounters and adventures that the alien has on his visit, episodes which never really amount to much of a plot but which manage to be by turn funny, poignant, affecting and disturbing anyway. Much of the film’s charm – which it has plenty of – stems from the people who do eventually notice the alien and start interacting with him. Their reactions to the empathetic, never-speaking alien opens doors on their inner thoughts and feelings.

Sayles homes in on the everyday aspects of people’s lives. This isn’t a science fiction film about state-of-the-art effects or dazzling set-pieces. It’s a snapshot of an urban community, a gentle meander through the very ordinary mundanities of everyday life. It’s, initially at least, a refreshingly non-stereotypical portrait of a New York community all too often demonised and feared, as represented here by the initially panicked reactions of a pair of hopeless white men from Indiana in search of a self-actualising conference who find themselves lost in the neighbourhood.

In the latter half of the film, the alien is taken ion a nightmarish nocturnal tour of the neighbourhood accompanied by a young Rastafarian, Virgil (Sidney “Piankhy” Sheriff Jr) that takes in the hookers, crazies, junkies and homeless that the area had become synonymous with but it’s used to contrast sharply with the altogether more appealing daytime vision of a community not entirely working together but always providing support and understanding when it’s needed.

The anti-drug stance seems to have been slotted in to emphasise this alternate vision of Harlem but it adds little to the story – Sayles is a fine writer who could surely have found a more subtle, less obvious way for the community to come together. It, and the silly shenanigans with the bounty hunters (through they do get a very funny moment when their pursuit of the alien is temporarily derailed by government bureaucracy), are the only sour moments in an otherwise witty, compassionate and well-written story.

In particular, Sayles gives many of the characters that the alien meets lengthy monologues which are delivered with aplomb by the talented cast and which are always winning and never outstay their welcome. While of the cast are excellent, it’s Joe Morton’s film. His performances as the alien, who starts out confused and not a little terrified by his new surroundings, becomes increasingly confident as he’s accepted by the neighbourhood despite his eccentricities and finally becomes happy and at peace with his new home, is outstanding. He radiates both an otherworldliness and a childlike innocence that helps us side with him though he never makes a single sound throughout.

Quite who he is or where he came from is never really made clear though it’s beside the point really. He visits an exhibition dedicated to the life of the extraordinary Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist who helped free 70 slaves via the “Underground Railway”, a network of safe houses scattered across the States, during which he indicates that he too was a slave. And that’s about as much as we get to know about him. Normally this might be infuriating but here it works like a charm – the enigmatic alien remains unknowable even to the very end when we’re left with his inscrutable smile having been fully accepted by his new community and that’s exactly as it should be.

As relevant today as it was then (and sadly that’s nothing to be proud of), The Brother from Another Planet is both a gentle “fish out of water” comedy and a stinging social satire. Sometimes that satire can be a bit on-the-nose and simplistic but it was and remains a provocative film that came close to the use of metaphor and allegory in literature than anything other of the many science-fiction films (Dune, The Terminator, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, The Last Starfighter, Runaway, 2010, Starman et al) released in that most science fictional of years, 1984.

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