AllMovie

Nightjohn, originally produced for the Disney Channel, marks venerated independent filmmaker Charles Burnett's first made-for-TV feature, and was the first feature of his remarkable career that he did not have a hand in writing. Based on a young-adult novel, the film is a slave narrative that has many familiar elements (recognizable from other productions that deal with slavery, including Roots and Glory) and, ostensibly, in its simple, straightforward storytelling, little to connect it to the narrative complexity of the filmmaker's other works, such as To Sleep With Anger and Killer of Sheep. This only adds to the astonishing achievement of the film, which transcends its seeming limitations to achieve remarkable clarity of vision and tremendous emotional power. For all the slave stories that have been told before, Nightjohn is exemplary in its depiction of a sense of community among slaves, and in the palpable force with which it puts across its timeless theme involving the life-or-death importance of literacy. Nightjohn depicts plantation life with a moral ambiguity rare among such tales, and this paradoxically adds to the film's power. While the slave owner played by Beau Bridges is clearly villainous in his treatment of the slaves, portraying him as a fully-fleshed human being and not simply a monster allows for a deeper understanding of history, and thus to a more comprehensive vision of how the tale relates to our own times. While the acting is uneven and the script occasionally far-fetched, Burnett's essential intelligence and humaneness as a filmmaker shine through.