Blind Spot Double Feature: BROTHER TO BROTHER and PARIAH
Checking two important queer coming-of-age films off my somewhat neglected watchlist. Light spoilers ahead if these are still in your blind spot.
Before they were the Wilson siblings on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Anthony Mackie and Adepero Oduye were both making contributions to the queer coming-of-age canon. In 2004, Mackie starred in Rodney Evans’ Brother to Brother as Perry, an art student who is struggling with the intersections of his identity when he meets Harlem Renaissance legend Richard Bruce Nugent. Seven years later, Oduye starred in Dee Rees’ Pariah as Alike, a 17-year-old butch lesbian with a talent for writing, who comes into her own despite the stifling expectations of her family. Both films had been on my watchlist for some time, and so during this past month, I finally sat down to view them as a complementary pairing.
Though the scrappiness of Brother to Brother is quite apparent, writer-director Rodney Evans’ vision shines through, particularly in Mackie’s performance. Forced from his home when his father discovers him with another young man, Perry works at shelter to pay for school. It’s there that he meets Bruce (Roger Robinson), a surviving artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Bruce tells Perry all about his days with the likes of Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston, shown in black-and-white flashbacks that present-day Bruce and Perry step into to observe. In his own time, Perry clashes with his Black classmates about the significance of being both Black and gay, and becomes protective of his art when a white curator takes interest, lest he be asked to alter his expression the way Bruce and his cohort were in order to be published. All the while, what Perry wants most is connection, and ultimately, the intimacy he needs does not come from his friend-briefly-turned-lover, Jim. It comes from his time with Bruce, which culminates in a portrait session, where they each pose for and paint the other.
“You have these two people with so much respect and love and admiration for each other,” Mackie said of Perry and Bruce in the commentary he recorded for the film, “and they don’t consummate their relationship through the physical or sex or anything like that. They consummate their relationship through creation. It was something I had never really read or experienced or seen anybody deal with before.”
The commentary reveals just how much of a learning experience this film was for a young Anthony Mackie. During multiple scenes, he points out when his instinct had been to go really big emotionally, and how Evans would direct him to something more internalized. Through that direction, he says, he really came to understand Perry, and the story Evans wanted to tell.
Without rehashing the incident too much, there was an interview with Mackie that came out earlier this year (conducted by a writer who has a history of inciting controversy, specifically around Black actors), which led to some people jumping to conclusions about his feelings regarding the possibility of portraying a character as queer. I hadn’t even seen Brother to Brother yet at the time, but it was still the first thing I thought of. You have to know that it’s no small thing for a young actor, especially a young actor of color, to take a role like this one. In response to the debacle, some old interviews with Mackie from when Brother to Brother came out were shared around. In one for the Windy City Times, he talks about unlearning the things ingrained in him growing up in the South, and taking on the role of Perry with intention:
“[…] when I took on this role my homophobia was really something that I wanted to conquer by looking at it through myself. So the role was very therapeutic for me. […] I had to face a lot of demons but I wanted to do that through this role because a lot of my friends who are gay felt like I didn’t respect them as gay men. Our relationships were suffering because of my homophobia and having looked at that and faced it head on and dealt with it I feel like a stronger human being now and I’m glad people are recognizing that.”
Among its accolades, Brother to Brother won the Audience Award for Best Feature at the 2004 San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (now the Frameline Film Festival), and Anthony Mackie was nominated for Breakthrough Actor and Best Debut Performance at the Gotham Independent Awards and the Independent Spirit Awards, respectively.
By all accounts, Dee Rees’s 2011 feature Pariah, an expansion of her short film by the same name, was also a scrappy production. But while Brother to Brother employed a bit of the fantastical to resurrect Nugent and transport us back in time, Pariah is so grounded in its present moment and the reality of the complicated, deeply human experiences of its characters, Rees recalls people mistaking the film for a documentary. It’s a testament to the craft of everyone involved – from Rees and her script that came to life straight off the page, to cinematographer Bradford Young and his stunning use of natural light, to each performer and the difficult lines their characters straddled.
Adepero Oduye has a hold on my heart as Alike, who is sure of her preferences for masculine clothes, indie music, and girls, but is forced to navigate a society and a home life that are unyielding to difference. She has her allies out in the world – Mrs. Alvarado (Zabryna Guevara), the English teacher that encourages her to dig deeper with her writing, and her best friend Laura (Pernell Walker), with whom she can safely socialize in queer spaces. At home, Alike’s mother (Kim Wayans) vehemently disapproves of her clothes, and of Laura. She is closer to her father (Charles Parnell), but he also exacerbates the tension in the family by being detached from his wife and choosing to ignore what they suspect about their daughter. Alike finds a middle ground with Bina (Aasha Davis), a mother-approved friend who ends up having a lot in common with Alike than she expects.
In terms of characters and relationships, Dee Rees just gets it. People like to make jokes about queer women and all their friends-turned-lovers-turned-exes, but I think especially when you’re young, the spaces you can be your authentic self and connect with your community are limited, so it’s no surprise how friendship and romantic love can become intwined. The tension that mounts between Alike and Laura when Alike starts spending more time with Bina hits a tender place in my heart, as does the devastating shift that takes place after Alike and Bina spend the night together. During a virtual cast reunion to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the film, Aasha Davis got to the heart of what could make Bina suddenly shut Alike out, after they’d become so close.
“It’s that teenage feeling of being embarrassed, and people having ideas about who you are without you presenting those ideas,” she explained. “And I think I just kind of went with that, with her… the fear of her telling people what had happened and me not being able to present myself the way I want to be seen. That was how I was able to get away with breaking this beautiful girl’s heart.”
There are no real, intentional villains in Pariah. Kim Wayans had to do some of the most difficult work in the film as Alike’s mother Audrey, but as heartbreaking and frustrating as it is to watch her repeatedly impose her rigid expectations of femininity on her daughter, we see that we’re dealing with such a layered character. She too is fighting to conform to expectations of a good wife to a disinterested husband, and it’s taking a toll on her. When she sits down to dinner with the family minus Alike after their physical altercation, it’s so clear that something is broken in her too. Rees said, during the cast reunion, that she had been on the brink of rewriting Audrey because none of the actresses who auditioned got her until Wayans, and I believe that. Without the depth she brought to the character, maybe we don’t recover from hearing a mother respond to her daughter’s “I love you” with “I’ll be praying for you.”
Pariah is proof that the universality of storytelling doesn’t come from sanding down a story that is personal and specific. Rees did come up against the unfortunately common recasting suggestions, such as making Laura white or Latina, but was able to retain her entirely Black cast. This in no way stopped the feedback pouring in from viewers of all backgrounds, about characters and situations that resonated with them. I myself come from a mixed family that wasn’t all that bothered by me being gay and wearing ties to family functions. But I see my parents’ fraught relationship in Alike’s parents. I see myself and my younger brother in Alike and her sister, siblings who are at each other’s throats, but there for each other when it counts. I see my past friendships and unrequited loves in Alike’s relationships.
For every part of this film I chose to focus on, I thought of something else that I found striking, but I will wrap up here and encourage you to watch or rewatch this gorgeous film yourself. I have to give one last shout out to the script, particularly to Alike’s statement to her father toward the end of the film that truly took my breath away:
“I’m not running. I’m choosing.”
Topping off several nominations, Pariah was awarded Best Independent Film by the African-American Film Critics Association and the Black Film Critics Circle, and Outstanding Independent Motion Picture at the 44th NAACP Image Awards. Adepero Oduye won three Best Breakout Performance awards, from the African-American Film Critics Association, the Black Reel Awards, and the Black Film Critics Circle.