Cinema: The Sound and the Fury

WISE BLOOD Directed by John Huston; Screenplay by Benedict Fitzgerald

Wise Blood is the most eccentric American movie in years, and no wonder. The director, John Huston, 73, is a genuine maverick: though his long career has included many conventional entertainments (The African Queen, The Man Who Would Be King), he has always been game for such bizarre experiments as Beat the Devil, Freud and Reflections in a Golden Eye. This time, Huston has found material that was all but guaranteed to fuel the battiest recesses of his imagination. Wise Blood is based on Flannery O’Connor’s extraordinary first novel, which infused the conventions of Southern gothic fiction with fiery Catholicism and surrealistic wit. Huston takes to O’Connor’s hothouse style like a gambler to a royal flush. The inevitable results are the very essence of weird.

The world that Huston and O’Connor create is so peculiar and self-contained that many may find Wise Blood impenetrable. The film features characters who are all crazy, themes that are religious and humor that ranges from dark to gruesome. Though the movie is by no means difficult to comprehend on its own terms, Huston does not attempt to win over disbelievers. It is not surprising that independent producers, rather than a Hollywood studio, took the considerable risk of financing the project.

Wise Blood is about Hazel Motes, a young Army veteran who comes home to rural Georgia determined to overthrow his past. Hazel’s grandfather was an evangelical preacher; Hazel decides to revolt against his legacy by starting his own “Church Without Christ.” As forcefully played by Brad Dourif (the stuttering inmate in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), the young hero is an angry, obsessed loner with penetrating eyes and a fierce bark. When he tries and fails to start his new church, he meets a large array of even greater crackpots: a charlatan street preacher who fakes blindness (Harry Dean Stanton), a zookeeper (Daniel Shor) in search of an animalistic deity, an evangelical merchandising expert (Ned Beatty) and some sex-starved belles (Amy Wright, Mary Nell Santacroce). Huston has great affection for these people, even if Hazel does not: the misfits are celebrated not only for their lunacies but for their comic inability to square their passions with normal spiritual or temporal ambitions. About Hazel, however, Wise Blood is dead serious. In his own topsy-turvy, blasphemous and finally violent way, he is headed toward salvation. He ends up closer to God than his grandfather would have dared.

Huston re-creates the grotesque imagery and internal logic of O’Connor’s phantasmagoric parable by translating the writer’s prose into cinematic and dramatic terms. The film’s settings are glutted with eclectic religious artifacts and the documentary details of the backwater South. The cast, including even bit players who appear as cops, used-car salesmen and townsfolk, features enough oddballs to staff a Tennessee Williams repertory company. Huston’s only lapses are a few purple flashback sequences that accomplish little beyond allowing the di rector to appear onscreen as Hazel’s grandfather. Still, those moviegoers who have a taste for Wise Blood are not going to cavil about flaws. It is enough to ride the wild imaginative waves of this singular artistic adventure. —Frank Rich