Wise Blood

John Huston is one of those directors whose work I've found very uneven as I've gone through it, at least in terms of how much I've liked it. Some of the movies are greats, like The Maltese Falcon or The Asphalt Jungle; others like Sinful Davey and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean have left me much colder. Another movie that fits into that second category is Wise Blood.

Based on a book by southern writer Flannery O'Connor, the movie stars Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes. Hazel has just gotten out of the army, and returned to his old home somewhere in Georgia, although the exact location isn't mentioned. Apparently his parents must have died while he was in the army and nobody told him, since he gets to the old homestead acting as though he's expecting somebody to be there for him. Instead, the home is dilapidated and everybody's been buried. So Hazel sells off his army uniform, buys a new suit of clothes, and sets off for the big city of Taulkinham.

Taulkinham looks amazingly like the city of Macon, GA, considering how many of the businesses are Macon something-or-others. (As you can guess, and the closing credits reveal, the film was indeed shot in Macon.) After cavorting with a prostitute, Hazel goes out to see the town, which is how he meets Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton) and Hawks' daughter Sabbath (Amy Wright). Asa is a blind street preacher who is so obviously a fraud and con artist that you wonder why on earth anybody would stop and listen to this guy, much less make a donation. Hazel thinks Asa's preaching is nonsense, but he's clearly taken by Sabbath. He also makes his one friend in Taulkinham, another transplant named Enoch Emory (Dan Shor). Or, at least, Enoch considers him a friend.

Hazel decides he's going to find out where Sabbath and her father live, which turns out to be a rooming house run by an unnamed landlady (Mary Nell Santacroce). After some talking with Sabbath and Asa, and Hazel's rejection of traditional Christianity, Hazel decides he's going to become a street preacher too, preaching the Church of Truth Without Christ, or something like that.

How anybody could listen to Hazel either is a mystery that is left unanswered. But Sabbath keeps pursuing Hazel, and Enoch tries to keep making Hazel be his friend. Asa's non-blindness is revealed by Hazel and Asa winds up working with another preacher (Ned Beatty), while Enoch goes nuts and steals a gorilla costume in a subplot that makes no sense whatsoever.

In fact, none of the movie makes sense. Perhaps I'm being too hard on John Huston, and instead should be harder on Flannery O'Connor for writing a story that doesn't translate to film. (Having not read the original book, I don't know if it doesn't work in print form either.) It also doesn't help that there's not one likeable character here. Every one of them is a selfish jerk, and with a bare wisp of a story, it's hard to be interested in these people.

However, some people will probably enjoy this look at a certain segment of society at an unnamed time. As for that time, most of the production design such as the cars suggests the 1970s (the movie was released in 1979), but the themes seem more from the days of The Trip to Bountiful (just after World War II) and Hazel takes what really seems to be a pre-Amtrak train. I assume the themes are supposed to be timeless.

So Wise Blood is absolutely a movie that you're going to have to watch and judge for yourself. You may come to a completely different conclusion than I did.