As far as I know (and I make no claims to know very much at all), John Huston's Wise Blood is the only existing feature film adaptation of a Flannery O'Connor work. If you've read any O'Connor at all, you can understand why. Her darkly comic, grotesque Southern tales of a fallen world and the promise (or hint of promise?) of redemption in Christ could easily misfire in a visual medium. But I believe Huston comes as close as anyone could.
As the film opens in an unnamed Southern town (which turns out to be Macon, Georgia), Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) is coming home from military service. He's been in a war, but we don't know which one. Vietnam would be the obvious choice, but it doesn't take long before you realize your bearings are out of whack. The film was released in 1979, but the cars and the clothes appear older, as if Motes were parading through a cultural museum. Of course, that could all be explained by what many visitors to the South report after returning home: "It's the land that time forgot," or something to that effect.
Yet I digress. Motes returns to his childhood home, now long abandoned. He decides to head to "the city," takes a cab and is mistaken for a preacher. "I ain't a preacher," Motes says. "You look like one," the cab driver says and thus begins a mission for Motes, the founding of a Church of Christ without Christ where "the lame don't walk, the blind don't see and the dead stays that way."
What follows is a bizarre trip through a menagerie of misfits and oddities that would make David Lynch proud: Harry Dean Stanton as a blind preacher/beggar/con artist, Amy Wright as his daughter, a young, precocious Sabbath Lily Hawks and Ned Beatty in a brilliant but brief performance as Hazel's competition. Lest I forget, John Huston (billed in the credits as Jhon Huston) slips in and out of the picture as Hazel's fire-and-brimstone preacher grandfather.
As a narrative, many of the scenes just don't work, seeming to fall through the cracks. In one such scene, the slightly off-balance country boy Enoch Emery (Daniel Shor) becomes obsessed with a movie theater's promotional stunt in the form of a man wearing a gorilla costume. We know this is significant since Enoch works in a zoo, but it's a loose connection that's better developed in the novel. The same thing happens early in the film in a scene with a street peddler selling potato peelers. Dourif touches on these disconnects somewhat in one of the Criterion Collection disc's bonus features, stating that a film just can't capture everything O'Connor put on the page, which is true of just about every adaptation. (I point it out only in the hopes that you'll read the book!)
Yet Dourif's performance is a wonder to behold. Dourif's Motes has plenty of urgency but no joy. He (like the Misfit in O'Connor's most famous story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find") wants a world without Christ because he can't believe in Him. He can't believe in anything, yet makes statements that seem to be almost creed-like. In talking to mechanics about his junker of a car, Motes claims "This is a good car" and "A man with a good car don't need to be justified." This is an amazing performance. If you thought Dourif was good as Billy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (and he was), you'll be stunned at his portrayal of Hazel Motes.
So what is O'Connor (via Huston) trying to say? That there's nothing to believe in? Or is this a religious parable? A picture of Postmodern man? Again, if you've read much from O'Connor or know much about her life (She was a devout Roman Catholic.), the picture becomes clearer. Or does it?
Wise Blood is a fascinating, off-beat film that won't work for everyone, but could definitely generate some good discussion. (Huston filmed it just after the outstanding The Man Who Would be King and the forgettable Phobia.) Wise Blood may not be a film you'd want to own, but then again, it includes as a bonus feature an audio recording of Flannery O'Connor reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the only known recording of O'Connor reading her work. That bonus feature alone is worth the price of the disc.
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