DVD OF THE WEEK: Wise Blood

Wise Blood
Directed by John Huston
1979, 106 minutes, USA
Criterion

"I reckon you think you've been redeemed."
- Brad Dourif as "Hazel Motes" in Wise Blood.

John Huston (The Asphalt Jungle, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fat City), in one of the last few films of his directorial career, appears in flashback as a fire-and-brimstone evangelist whose tent-preaching thunder terrifies his young grandson into wetting himself. That boy will grow up to be pale-eyed, paler-skinned protagonist Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif, inducing some serious heebie-jeebies in a career best), a drifting WWII veteran who has rejected the army and just about everything else—especially, fanatically and noisily, God. Thus, one might read Huston's casting as a wink, that even though it was Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald who co-adapted Flannery O'Connor's first novel, Huston equally recognized her strange, disturbing, southern-gothic tragedy was as much a farce, colored as black as a soul without purpose. Huston represents a nurturing cause and literal ancestry to Hazel's fervor, a comic analogy to both his role as a director and being as much an unbeliever as Hazel thinks he is. If that's not enough, Huston misspells his own name "Jhon" in the opening credits, the font an uneducated person's scrawl.

Shot mostly in Georgia, easily recalling the photos of Walker Evans, and taking place in the sleepy fictional town of Taulkinham, Wise Blood follows Hazel's intense, head-down, double-stepping towards starting the Church Without Christ, which isn't so much atheist as it is nihilist, free of dogma and dues and false miracles. It's a church "where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way," but whatever street corner Hazel twitchily makes his soap box, the competition is fierce and wildly eccentric. There's the phony preacher Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton, surely gaining experience to play his corrupt prophet on Big Love), a con artist who pretends to have blinded himself while his nymphomaniac daughter Sabbath Lily (Amy Wright) coos at Hazel, and Hoover Shoates (Ned Beatty), an even bigger money-eyed crook who hawks faith as if it were a used car. But that doesn't make Hazel the default hero and all Christianity depicted as fraudulent, as while he rants "Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar. I ain't saying that he weren't crucified, but it weren't for you," a secret conflict against his (non-)beliefs lies within him, literally under his clothes. Otherworldly in its characterizations (did I forget to mention the naïve, hyperactive 18-year-old obsessed with both a shrunken mummy and some guy in a bear suit?) but too sad or realistically perverse—even during a violent act late in the film—to be written off as a grotesque carnival, Wise Blood is not the tale of redemption or maybe accidental martyrdom that the final scenes superficially symbolize. It's about the powerlessness of existence, which is both as terrifying and absurd as that sounds.

Posted by ahillis at May 12, 2009 4:49 PM