Yahoo Movies Burning Cane on Netflix is definitely worth your time
In the United Kingdom, Burning Cane flew relatively under the radar at the London Film Festival, where it had its premiere on this side of the Atlantic. In the USA, however, the film has already been lauded. A lot.
And this praise is not just in the corners of Twitter. Burning Cane has won Best Narrative Feature, Best Actor (for Wendell Pierce), and Best Cinematography awards at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. It also saw it's director Phillip Youmans win the Founders Award, making him the first African American director to win the trophy. Youmans is 19 and made the film two years ago.
Which is perhaps why the movie feels as if it's been shot at a sidelong glance, the prying eyes of youth at the older generations' ordeals, meant to be kept a secret from them.
Burning Cane takes place in a Louisiana town and is narrated by widowed matriarch Helen Wayne (played by Karen Kaia Livers), who does her best to be a guide not only for her adult son Daniel (Dominique McClellan) but also for her pastor.
Helen is the backbone of the movie. Without her, it would flit from problematic man to problematic man. She narrates with the languour of a fireside storyteller, the poignancy of a Greek chorus, and the enchantment of a professor. And like any good storyteller, the meaning of her allegories suddenly dawn on you in a burst of awe.
This feeling permeates the film, whose deep hues, flickering cigarettes and meandering cinematography all culminate in an hour and 17 minutes of glorious, troubling, beautiful movie watching. The scenes are stitched together like patches on a quilt, the seams made up of as beautiful thread as the thing itself.
Religion is at the heart of Burning Cane, and in particular, Reverend Tillman, for whom modernity strikes a deep chord of fear, a fear of fragility, of a lack of a place in the world.
Instead of progressing, however, Tillman rages against progress, his hypocrisy only thinly veiled from everyone else – but not from Helen.
She sees the same demons in her son, whose joblessness and drinking has rendered him a bad father. Or, perhaps, his joblessness and drinking lifted the lid on a fear that was always there: a fear that he was less than a man.
Burning Cane is about fear, legacy, and shame and the intersection of these is at the heart of the film, its protagonists all approaching the intersection at breakneck speed. And the victim in the middle is young Jeremiah, the next generation who will inherit... Well, the legacy is yet to be determined.
But Helen isn't going to leave it up to God to determine her grandchild's future.
In Burning Cane and indeed in real life, religion works as a sort of therapy. But the rule of therapy should be true for religion: it only works if you put in the work. It shouldn't be enough to pray on it, to sing the hymns (sung to haunting effect in Burning Cane), to show up on Sunday and get a pass on your bad behaviour.
Unfortunately, religion – both in life and in the film – can offer lip-service salvation, which the men in the film turn to as justification for their actions. God: he will forgive them even if their women don't.
Burning Cane is complicated and nonjudgmental, a deeply intimate but also a universal exploration of what happens when we become stuck in dogma, in a downward spiral, in indecision. In and of itself, Burning Cane feels like one of Helen's stories – you don't know what it means till the end.
Burning Cane is now streaming on Netflix.
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