The Final Insult
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As I remarked of Nightjohn a couple of years ago, Burnett’s mainstream successes have only increased his anonymity in the mainstream. None of the TV Guide listings for that film or The Wedding carried his name, nor was either film scripted by him. In fact The Wedding–an Oprah Winfrey project for which Burnett was brought on as a hired gun–can’t truthfully be considered a Burnett film at all. It functions fairly well as an interracial soap opera with a high-gloss setting (Martha’s Vineyard in the 50s) and at least one first-rate performance (Shirley Knight as the black heroine’s grandmother), but it doesn’t register with the precision or personal stamp that Burnett brought to Nightjohn; the elaborate machinery of the miniseries genre, unwieldy flashbacks and all, seems to have overwhelmed him. Even one of the more interesting aspects of the story–the way the grandmother judges her various relatives on the basis of skin tone, and how these various discriminations became confused with questions of class–appears to be serviced more than inflected by Burnett’s participation. It’s honorable work on its own limited terms, but not something that deserves to be ranked alongside any of Burnett’s shorts or features; the overriding glamour engulfs whatever the film has to say–and whatever Burnett might have hoped to say through it.
Everyone will do whatever it takes to get it swimming in the sea again.
The conspiracies formed years ago:
The state claimed I owe $50,000.
