A pall of dread, of terrible suspense, hangs over Brother from its opening moments, when 20something Francis (Aaron Pierre) is, well, perhaps goading isn’t quite the right word, but definitely energetically pushing his younger late-teens sibling Michael (Lamar Johnson: Dark Phoenix) to join him in a climb of an electrical pylon — you know, those big spindly towers that carry electrical lines throughout our cities and suburbs — where death by electrocution threatens should either take just the tiniest of wrong steps. As Francis warns. Doom is stalking the brothers, and could take them at any moment.
There is, alas, a metaphor in this.
We keep coming back to the climb, in a film that jumps around temporally — from the early 1980s to the circa 1991 of the climb to late 2001 — and interweaves the three timelines, even after it becomes clear that Something Bad happened to Francis that has a dreadful impact on Michael and their mom, overworked nurse and single parent Ruth (Marsha Stephanie Blake: The Photograph, Luce). Did the pylon climb end in tragedy?
Except… Michael and Francis are Black. (Their mom is an immigrant from Jamaica. Their dad is, too, but he is extremely absent from their lives.) And even though they live in Toronto, in the district of Scarborough, the Canadian reputation for Niceness doesn’t seem to protect them. The cops are racist as shit, and Francis and Michael live with as much tension and in as much fear of the bigoted society at large as Black people in America and the United Kingdom (and elsewhere, too) do, and with good reason, as we very soon learn. There are so many potential tragedies awaiting them every time they step out their door.
Now, look, I know this: I’m white and American (if now ex-pat, if only in the very similar UK) and somewhat privileged, and I don’t mean to sound naive. I think people like me who care about social justice have clung to the notion of Canadian niceness, however deluded, in the hopes that it meant that equality and fairness in a majority-white society (*whispers* a majority-white society because the white people decimated all the nonwhite people) was possible. I still think — hope? — it can be. But this movie reminds us clueless white folks that we’re nowhere near there yet. Black people already knew this.
Also this: I know, from reading film critics who are nonwhite and specifically Black, that they’re tired of movies about Black trauma. And I get that. And I get that movies about Black pain are many and Black joy are too few and far between, and that we need more of the latter (yes please). Brother is yet another movie about Black trauma. About what it means to be a Black person, specifically a Black man, navigating the racist Western world. It’s a very good movie, in the sense that it is beautifully performed by actors who should be getting all the jobs, they’re so gorgeous inside and out, and structurally intriguing, and simply very powerfully empathetic of its protagonist, the sweet, sensitive Michael. (The little family’s home in a slightly rundown tower block is damn near a character itself, their apartment a tidy, delicately observed refuge from an uncertain, sometimes dangerous world at large.) But it is about Black pain.
Writer and director Clement Virgo is Black, and he is adapting the acclaimed novel by David Chariandy, who is also Black, and they are both Canadian, and their perspectives are necessary and need to be heard, especially for how relatively rare their perspectives are onscreen. And, I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but maybe there’s a particular lesson here, either accidentally or deliberately, for non-Black audiences about the Black experience, and maybe even particularly for white men about nonwhite men. Because Brother is also very much about men being so fucking stupid that you want to smack them, like What the fuck were you even thinking, you goddamn idiot? Because this is also a movie about toxic masculinity, about men being completely blind to their own bullshit, because they’re allowed to be or even encouraged to be by the culture at large.
Cuz, okay: Francis pushing Michael to do something so stupidly dangerous as climb an electrical pylon merely for the view they might get at the top? How many stupid boys of all skin tones have done similarly reckless things? Probably most of them. And yet most of the dudes who chance stuff like this survive. Brother has many things to say, but the one that has stuck with me is this: Black boys and men deserve to survive their stupid heedless aggression long enough to learn from it and overcome it in the same way that far more white boys and men do.
more films like this:
• Moonlight [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Kanopy US | Max US | BBC iPlayer UK]
• If Beale Street Could Talk [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK]
