| The Brother from Another Planet | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | John Sayles |
| Produced by | Peggy Rajski Maggie Renzi |
| Written by | John Sayles |
| Starring | Joe Morton Darryl Edwards Steve James Bill Cobbs David Strathairn |
| Music by | Mason Daring John Sayles Denzil Botus |
| Cinematography | Ernest R. Dickerson |
| Editing by | John Sayles |
| Distributed by | Cinecom Pictures |
| Release date(s) | September 7, 1984 |
| Running time | 104 minutes[1] |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $350,000[2] |
The Brother from Another Planet (1984) is a science fiction film written, directed and edited by John Sayles.[3] It stars Joe Morton as an extraterrestrial who has escaped to Earth and who hides in New York City.
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Joe Morton stars in this dramatic comedy, set in New York City in the early 1980s, as "The Brother", an alien and escaped slave who, while fleeing "Another Planet", has crash-landed in Upper New York Harbor.
Picked up as homeless, he is deposited in Harlem. The sweet-natured and honest Brother looks like any other black man, except that he is mute and - although other characters in the film never see them - his feet each have three large toes. The Brother has telekinetic powers but, unable to speak, he struggles to express himself and adjust to his new surroundings, including a stint in the Job Corps at a video arcade in Manhattan.
He is chased by two white Men in Black (David Strathairn and director Sayles himself); Sayles's twist on the Men in Black concept is that instead of government agents trying to cover up alien activity, Sayles's Men in Black are also aliens, out to re-capture "The Brother" and other escaped slaves and bring them back to their home planet. Unlike the many human characters in this film, the aliens themselves are oblivious of skin color, and screenwriter Sayles has one of the Men in Black utter an epithet "Three Toe" when describing their quarry, in attempt to prove that skin color is just as arbitrary as number of toes or any other human characteristic that would make one different from another.
Sayles spent part of his MacArthur Fellows "genius" grant on the film, which cost $350,000 to produce.[2]
Variety called it "vastly amusing but progressively erratic" film structured as a "series of behavioral vignettes, [many of which] are genuinely delightful and inventive"; as it continues, the film "takes a rather unpleasant and, ultimately, confusing turn."[1] Vincent Canby called it a "nice, unsurprising shaggy-dog story that goes on far too long" but singled out "Joe Morton's sweet, wise, unaggressive performance."[4] Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, saying "the movie finds countless opportunities for humorous scenes, most of them with a quiet little bite, a way of causing us to look at our society", noting that "by using a central character who cannot talk, [Sayles] is sometimes able to explore the kinds of scenes that haven't been possible since the death of silent film."[5]
The A.V. Club, in a 2003 review of the film's DVD release, says the film's superhero scenes are "often unintentionally silly, but again, Sayles shapes a catchy premise into a subtler piece, using Morton's 'alien' status as a way of asking who deserves to be called an outsider in a country born of outsiders"; commenting on the DVD, they note its "marvelous" audio commentary track by Sayles, "who moves fluidly from behind-the-scenes anecdotes to useful technical tips to unpretentious dissections of his own themes."[6]
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