Wise Blood

After reading so much of Flannery O'Connor's work recently, I was keen to see the film version of her acclaimed novel Wise Blood, directed by the great John Huston. I've been wanting to see this film since it was released in 1979. Better late than never, I guess.

The opening scenes are brilliant. The credit sequence is in black and white, and features photographs of roadside signs in the deep, rural south, all of them proclaiming the redemptive power of Jesus Christ. A gravestone has a telephone attached to it, and the words underneath read "Jesus Called." The credits themselves are in a child's scrawl, and misspell Huston's first name as "Jhon." Then we see a soldier beside a road, hitching a ride. He is Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), and he is returning to his homestead, which he finds abandoned and overgrown. As the music (adapted by Alex North) mixes "The Tennessee Waltz" and Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," he pokes around the family graveyard. One stone also has a word misspelled--instead of "angel" it says "angle." And Dourif flashes back to his grandfather, a tent-revival preacher (played by Huston himself).

Dourif, finding nothing for him in his hometown, decides to head for city. "I'm going to do some things there," he tells anyone who will listen. "I'm going to do some things I ain't never done before." In his new suit and hat he is mistaken for a preacher, though he despises religion. Arriving at the train station, he jots down a name written on a men's room wall and heads straight for that address, and promptly moves in the with the accommodating whore, who tells him she doesn't mind if he's a preacher, as long as he has four dollars.

This is the world of Flannery O'Connor--the Southern grotesque. Dourif, though despising preachers, ends up preaching on the street himself, creating a church he calls "The Church Without Christ." He has only one acolyte: a mentally disturbed young man (Dan Shor) who has a an obsessive fascination with both apes and a mummified child that is on display at a local museum. Dourif becomes obsessed with a blind preacher (Harry Dean Stanton) and his daughter (Amy Wright), and despises how they shill for money. When a rival street-preacher (Ned Beatty) begins preaching right next to Dourif, using a similarly-dressed prophet (William Hickey) Dourif takes drastic action.

There is a lot of stuff here. The imagery is striking; wherever Dourif goes, the imprint of Jesus surrounds him. He condemns Jesus, and says there must be a new one, but he is resistant to all that is spiritual. When Shor presents him the mummy as a religious icon, Dourif rejects it. In fact, Dourif pours all of his faith into something that is tangible--a beat-up automobile. When he is told that the radiator won't hold water, he tells the attendant to pour water in there anyway, as apt a metaphor for religious faith as I've heard. When the car ends up failing him, he snaps, and becomes something of an ascetic. His landlady says he should join a "monkery."

I can't fully recommend Wise Blood, though. The problem is that there are so many eccentrics, freaks, and crackpots in the cast of characters that there's no sense of normalcy. The script needed a way in for the audience. When some of these characters bump up against each other it's like taking two random crazy people and watching them interact--they react without any particular rhyme or reason. The film thus becomes an exercise in bizarre behavior, and while intellectually stimulating is dramatically bereft. There are some wonderful set pieces, such as when Shor goes to a movie promotion for a film starring a giant gorilla, but they don't hold together in the center.

Included on this Criterion DVD is a few worthy extras, including an audio recording of O'Connor reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and a PBS special with Bill Moyers interviewing Huston. It was when he was directing Annie, and Moyers is amazed that Huston is able to watch playback on a video monitor. It seems amusing now, as all movies are made this way now.