Killer of Sheep
dir. Charles Burnett
Milestone Films
The tradition of neorealist movies — specifically, a slice-of-life story with static characters in a story without such screenwriter-isms as "plot points" or "inciting incidents" — has rarely been realized on these shores with the emotional clarity and vigor of Charles Burnett's 1977 Killer of Sheep, about a "middle class" black family in Los Angeles. Because of the extensive use of popular music (which is so perfectly deployed that it makes the best work of such mixtape auteurs as Quentin Tarantino, Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson seem rote by comparison) and the associated licensing costs, the movie wasn't commercially released in its day … but it wasn't meant to be. It was Burnett's thesis project, and he had intended the movie to be more of a roadshow event that would play in black communities. Restored by UCLA under the largesse of Steven Soderbergh, the movie is making its first trip around the country.
Perhaps because of its narrowly circumscribed target audience, Killer of Sheep is utterly without pandering, and 2007 viewers are privileged to get to see such an unvarnished point of view about Watts in the 1970s. But the neorealist approach and film-school budget doesn't mean that the movie plays like a mockumentary -- instead, it's meticulously composed, but never feels precious or airless. While the cast gives off a credible nonprofessional vibe, the movie's bedrock is two marvelous performances: Stan (Henry G. Sanders) and his unnamed wife (Kaycee Moore).
Stan's in bad shape: A father of two, he clings to the idea that his family is middle class, although they really live beneath the knife's edge of that distinction, given their severe fixer-upper of a home and paycheck-to-paycheck existence. Stan works at a slaughterhouse, his only prosperous acquaintances are criminals, and his lone prospect for career advancement is to take the liquor store owner up on her lascivious offer to work in the back room with her. And while this would make a nice backdrop for a you-and-me-against-the-world melodrama, things at home are dicey — Stan can rhapsodize about how a coffee cup against your cheek feels like making love, but he can't return his exasperated wife's affections. In fact, I don't think he ever actually speaks to her over the course of the film, instead always responding with his insomniac stoneface.
This comes to a head in the movie's most affecting scene, as she expends her gale-force desires against that stoneface during a slow dance to Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth," while he can't even bring himself to move his hands out of the prone position simply to hold her. But Burnett doesn't reduce their problems to merely being about Stan's absent libido; when Stan finally walks away, his wife nostalgically picks up a pair of baby shoes, which ties into what the movie suggests may be the underlying cause of Stan's melancholy: his grappling with the world his kids will inherit.
At Stan's slaughterhouse, goats are used to lead the lambs to the killing floor, and both Stan and the filmmakers seem overly conscious of the metaphors at play here. Burnett frequently cuts from children playing to sheep being herded into the abattoir, where they'll be killed, hung by their feet and skinned. The movie is filled with the roughhousing of the neighborhood kids, and Burnett continually teases you with the sense that some tragedy is going to befall them as they jump across rooftops, or ride three-to-a-bike into traffic, but the kid/sheep connection isn't about some sense of physical harm coiled and waiting for Watts' children. It's that Stan is also a sheep, herded into an unpleasant assembly line job, and he has realized he has about as many prospects for the future as the sheep he kills.
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The longest structured sequence in the film is the middle third, when, as a way to demonstrate to his buddies just how comfortably middle class he is, he decides to put his next paycheck toward getting a community car up and running. The movie devotes tens of minutes to following Stan as he tries to get a new engine, always suggesting some incipient tragedy (a thoroughly beaten man gets kicked in his injured head while Stan tries to purchase the engine; Stan and his friend agonizingly carry the huge engine down a rickety staircase) and ending when Stan decides that he can drive home with the engine hanging off the back of his gateless pickup — a proposition that lasts as long as him turning the ignition. A lesser film would have made explicit some other, more profitable use of that paycheck that Stan could have opted for (braces for his daughter! crutches for Tiny Tim!), but Burnett knows he needs no such commentary to show what a dead end Stan is in. (When they do get the car up-and-running, it becomes a Sunday drive for two families to the racetrack, which is spoiled by a flat tire and lack of a spare … much to the consternation of a passenger who wanted to bet on a surefire horse.)
Killer of Sheep is an acknowledged masterpiece, but Burnett hasn't had a career proportionate with that kind of notoriety — over the course of the '90s, he released To Sleep with Anger and The Glass Shield to theaters and Nightjohn and The Wedding to TV. It may just be that his concerns are so thoroughly anticommercial — realism plus African American life has been a hard sell even for the marquee directors who have embraced it. The most direct modern descendent of Killer of Sheep is David Gordon Green's 2000 debut George Washington, and its pattern of near-universal acclaim coupled with less than $250,000 at the box office suggest that audiences may never be ready for a movie like this should one arrive on their doorstep. But especially from a vantage of 30 years later, Killer of Sheep stands as the best kind of document: a fiction so informed by its time that it feels like history but breathes like art.
— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)
