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Basquiat's alien in Harlem, a wry John Sayles equation. Electronic beeps signal the crash landing on Ellis Island, the visitor (Joe Morton) emerges in rags and spiky dreads, hopping on three toes before Lady Liberty. To assimilate is to listen, he ambles through the new environment and absorbs its voices. Among the divagations is the Puerto Rican shopkeeper, the bored arcade junkie, the lost Midwesterners turned tavern philosophers, the trickster in the subway. Sanctuary is suspended between the seasoned barflies and the single mother from Alabama, the healing touch is best applied to electric appliances. ("Internal malfunctions" are prevalent, "a sense of history" on the other hand is in rather short supply.) At the museum, he gazes at slavery litographs and promptly understands—on his trail are interplanetary skulkers (Sayles and David Strathairn) who've learned about Earth from Dragnet episodes. "We have reason to believe this man is an illegal alien." "So is half the fucking city. So what?" Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth is the point of departure yet the matter-of-factness evokes a Pasolini fantasy (Arabian Nights, say), its astringency sets off the funky flights of Ernest Dickerson's cinematography: Little Anthony and the Imperials' "Two People in the World" sets the smitten discovery of a nightclub chanteuse (Dee Dee Bridgewater) in the risqué heart of Times Square, a tottering 360° pan announces a Rastafarian's tour of the nocturnal inferno. "Welcome to Babylon, brother." The joke is there's a whole galaxy inside your local neighborhood, anchored by Morton's soulful pantomime and laid out by Sayles with a camera not unlike his protagonist's removable eyeball, a recording orb that specializes in empathy for the voiceless. With Tom Wright, Steve James, Daryl Edwards, Renn Woods, Bill Cobbs, Caroline Aaron, Jaime Tirelli, Fisher Stevens, and Maggie Renzi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |