Over the last forty plus years, Sharon Gallagher, founding editor of Radix, has written many movie reviews. Most good things share the quality of being perennial, and Flannery O’Connor’s work is certainly that. It is for this reason that Sharon’s review of the film Wise Blood is included in this Radix issue. While the movie is now over forty years old and the story it was based on is sixty-eight, the elements that are dealt with seem surprisingly timely – probably because the problems that humanity must deal with are ever-present. O’Connor, as many will know, does not shy away from the shocking or the violent. Instead, she uses these elements to remind her audience of the cost of God’s grace. And that grace can be found anywhere. However, as she said, ‘‘My subject in fiction is the action of grace in the territory held largely by the devil.” People looking for a saccharine taste will not find that by imbibing O’Connor, and the same goes for watching this film. What they will be left with, however, are some serious considerations.
Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, was released in 1979 as a movie. Director John Huston, remaining close to the novel, has produced a movie notable for its attention to detail, its intelligent dialogue, and the intent of the story.
The film is full of stock Flannery O’Connor “southern crazies.” Huston failed only in the casting of the character Enoch Emory, played by Don Shor, an all-American boy type who doesn’t seem to connect with the weird lines he mouths. Brad Dourif (the suicidal young man in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) is well cast as the troubled Hazel Motes. He is remote and other-worldly in his attempt to shake himself from his past as the guilt-ridden grandson of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He is single-minded in his desire to establish the Church Without Christ. Harry Dean Stanton is also fine in the evil intensity with which he portrays the street preacher, Asa Hawks.
The sham-blind preacher Hawks and his slyly lustful daughter, Sabbath Lily, are classic examples of O’Connor characters; they are the opposite of what they seem, as is Hazel Motes. When Haze buys a new suit to begin a life of sin in the big city, he ends up looking like a country preacher. The more loudly he proclaims his worldliness the more his obsession leads him down the path to mysticism.
Huston’s casting of some Georgia locals in small parts adds to the authentic feeling of the movie. The woman who plays Haze’s landlady is especially right with her mixture of sleaziness, bourgeois pretensions, and hysteria. Her ghostly, creaking, Victorian house is perfect with its high ceilings and tattered wallpaper.
Because Huston’s mood is often so right it is sometimes jarring that this novel, written in 1932, was filmed in a modern setting. Haze’s shabby blue suit and black hat look anachronistic next to a rival preacher’s three-piece polyester. It also seems unlikely that such a professional hustler would get excited about making a few dollars a night from the collection. The problem is more than a change in prices and fashion. It’s hard to believe a scene where kids line up to shake the hand of a fake gorilla. Even in the deep South, kids have been jaded by TV and have lost that sense of wonder. We can only guess that the modern setting was motivated by a low budget.
Another off-note was Huston’s choice of “Tennessee Waltz” as background music for Haze’s homecoming from the Army to his grandfather’s abandoned house. The song sets a mood of warm nostalgia out of keeping with the somber mood of the movie. Though often funny, Wise Blood is neither lyrical nor romantic in tone.
It was hard for this reviewer to imagine how an audience uninitiated in O’Connor would take the story. Haze’s grandfather left him Christ-haunted and Christ-hating. An audience might conclude that Haze was maladjusted because of his fundamentalist background. But O’Connor’s point is that Haze couldn’t escape Christ, not because of his own neurosis, but because Christ was there.
At one point when Haze, proud of the broken-down car he’s bought, says, “Anybody with a good car needs no justification,” the audience in the San Francisco theater laughed in recognition.
O’Connor has chosen the broken-down automobile as the symbol of the American dream. Haze’s faith in it is complete. He can always sleep in it if he doesn’t have a place to stay and it will take him wherever he wants to go. When Haze preaches that it’s not right to believe anything you can’t see or hold in your hands, he’s making a belief system out of the unbelief in the American dream.
Although the movie’s ending is anything but upbeat, it does show a conversion in process. When Haze’s car is taken away from him—in the wink of an eye—and with it his plan for the future, the man is laid bare. He goes home and blinds himself because, “If there’s no bottom to your eyes they see more.”
In her book, O’Connor tells us that Haze’s landlady sees the pinpoint of light in the blind man’s eyes as some kind of star, “like the star on Christmas cards. She saw him going backwards to Bethlehem … ” The movie doesn’t give us as much insight into the minds of the characters as the book does, but it is faithful to the spirit of O’Connor’s work and fleshes it out with the colors and voices of the South.
Sharon Gallagher is the founding editor of Radix Magazine and the author of Finding Faith: Life-Changing Encounters with Christ.
(Reprinted from Radix 12:1)