Grit Notes

The external plot of Brother John is simple. A relatively middle aged black woman is in the doctor's office, and he, though ailing himself, still knows how to utilize bedside manner, lies, puts her in hospital. She dies from the tumor he had already diagnosed as fatal. Poitier's character appears, as he does during each family related death. I believe Beverly Todd is the romantic foil for Poitier's enigmatic angel. I believe Louisa is the love interest rather than the dead relative, but it is not really sweat and blood if I am off with the cast roles. This is the post-antebellum South where the American apartheid of Jim Crow is still within living memory, freshly cracked by Johnson's voting rights act, and the setting is an allegory for man's damnation, which, when Poitier's character vanishes, is suggestive as imminent in a purposely low key manner, but if you want to look for what I call transformative, study Will Geer and the girl as contrastive perceptors of Poitier's character. Thomas is kindly, but weary, losing his ability to drive, and under his empathetic manner is a cynical man whose suffering in itself is possibly the corrosive trigger of the end of the world that is about to start. Maybe louise_norlie would read Geer differently and see him as the Jamesian sponge who soaks up an improbable and fantastic conclusion, and that would not be wrong either, but his deterioration, simply a biological fact, becomes transformative evil because the suffering has no outlet, and thus by extension is born by what otherwise an objective process, in this case physical aging.