This film's writers, Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald, had direct ties to the source material's author, Flannery O'Connor. Their parents housed O'Connor for a few months in Connecticut when they were small boys, and their mother, Sally, became the literary executor of the O'Connor's legacy. When the two Fitzgerald boys were trying to make it in Hollywood, they zeroed in on her first novel, Wise Blood, as a way to get attention and get their careers moving, connecting with John Huston, and getting him to sign on if Benedict, who also acted as producer, could find the money. The Fitzgerald's were on set throughout production in Macon, GA, and they kept Huston to the novel as much as possible in the process of adaptation, essentially acquiring his technical skills while preventing him from pushing the film in a direction that might have gone against the book's original intention and spirit.
Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) is a young man just out of the army and returning to his home in the Deep South. Finding his country home abandoned, he leaves a threatening note to whomever might drag away his chifforobe and heads into the city, trading in his army uniform for a suit and hat that make him look like a preacher. Having no one in the city, he shacks up with a prostitute, and wanders around with promises to make something of himself, to do some things that he's never done before. On the street, he meets the blind preacher Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton) and his daughter Sabbath (Amy Wright), and a mixture of Hazel's own resistance to the idea of Jesus and the obvious charlatan aspects of Asa incite him to announce the creation of a new church, the Church of Truth without Christ.
The joys of the film are the specifics of the characters and the otherworldly picture of the religious Deep South that O'Connor drew in words and the Fitzgeralds and Huston translated into images. Part of that is the insistence on keeping the production as cheap as possible (about $900,000 according to Benedict) so they had to hire locals to fill out most of the small roles. From the one-handed mechanic to the weathered used car salesman to the small crowds that gather around Motes as he proclaims the truth of salvation without Christ, the texture of the world we see is so intricate and genuine while our central focus is on these outrageous characters at their center, including the wayward young man Enoch Emory (Dan Shor) who latches onto Motes because no one is nice to him in the city and Hoover Shoates (Ned Beatty) who wants to commercialize the message that Motes proclaims.
What Motes is proclaiming is really a celebration of the hole in the hearts of men, the hole that mankind has filled with all sorts of things to give itself meaning, insisting that the emptiness is enough. His message evolves slightly as he goes, insisting that nothing is enough, but then modifying it into saying that he'll provide a new Christ that is so different from man that it will give him new meaning. It's about here, when Shoates both leads Motes to finding Hawks as well as he decides that he has found this new Christ that Motes needs in the form of a tsantsa that was on display in the local museum, that the stories slightly diverge from a purely mechanical point of view. Motes is definitely the main focus of the film, but Shoates gets his small moments where he follows a traveling show around a costumed man dressed up as a gorilla that he pays four times to shake hands with, reaching out like he has some kind of real connection to the costume itself, eventually stealing it and running around town in it. Shoates, divorced from Motes' story after that, is portraying a thematic extension of the central idea of the emptiness in the human soul and the need to fill it with something, anything, even a gorilla.
Motes' story goes in a slightly different direction, with him becoming fascinated by Sabbath, the two of them sleeping together, and Sabbath getting permission from her daddy to pursue Motes as a potential husband. Motes becomes fascinated by Asa, though, because he's so mean and obviously corrupt but still promoting Jesus to the people. How does one say one thing and do another in direct opposition to his inner values? Is Motes doing the same thing? Eventually Motes goes so far as to replicate a certain Oedipal solution to his crisis.
Now, as a matter for interpretation, the ending is interesting. According to an interview with Michael Fitzgerald, he considered it straightforward that Motes had decided to become an ascetic in the service of God, the same Jesus he had deemed unworthy of him, the symbolism of his car that barely got him anywhere finally being ditched after he used it to commit a crime being there, practically on the surface, but Huston had a different take. He insisted that it meant that Motes had simply given up the fight against God and become the full atheist. The Fitzgeralds come together as a team, in particular Sally, spoke with Huston, and he declared that "Jesus wins this one." I never got the sense that Huston was ever going to fully push a script into a direction he wanted, but he was happy to make little changes as production went along here and there (the line about pillaging in The Man Who Would Be King kind of feels like that, though I would be surprised if it wasn't in the script), but it's just interesting to see an alternative creative force on set pushing right back.
That combination of Huston's technical skill, finding the right actors and letting them go, and the focused eye of the writers on set created this fascinating little film adapting O'Connor's prose into cinematic language. Sure, the outrageous descriptions she has are lost (I'm honestly surprised they didn't do a bunch of voiceover to try and preserve it) but that gets somewhat translated through the casting and performances. Dourif anchors the film with this restrained but manic performance as Motes, and on his shoulders he carries the entire film. Stanton is his normal, interesting, professional self, while Wright has this very odd quality about her as she does weird things to seduce Motes, like holding the tsantsa like a child as she holds her sweater over her head to resemble the Madonna and child. The bulk of the supporting cast, the locals, tend to be some variance of stiff, but since they're ancillary instead of central, it's easy to forgive (unlike, say, a central performance in Gran Torino).
I get the feeling that the book is funnier, though.
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