Brad Dourif Is Mesmerizingly Intense in John Huston's Brilliant 1979 Adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood
In John Huston’s bravura 1979 adaptation of the 1952 Flannery O’Connor novel Wise Blood, Brad Dourif plays Hazel “Haze” Motes, a veteran who returns from war with an unspecified injury and a burning fever to spread the Gospel.
He is anything but a conventional preacher/prophet/evangelist. He preaches a form of religion that’s like Christianity but explicitly rejects the divinity of Christ. He calls his makeshift, homemade religion the Church of Truth Without Christ and rejects, in addition to Jesus, God, any higher power, and the concepts of good and evil.
That’s the kooky thing about the Church of Truth Without Christ. From the outside, it looks like any other crackpot religion, but its doctrine and mythology make no goddamn sense at all. In that respect, it’s not too different from more respectable forms of organized religion.
Dourif gives a wonderfully uncompromising performance. He burns with furious intensity from the first frame to the last. In a rare and welcome lead role, the beloved character actor makes no effort to make his protagonist likable, sympathetic, or relatable.
You’d have to be out of your mind to relate to a lunatic like Haze. His motives are inscrutable. His aims are mysterious. He does not want money. He does not want power. He does not want sex. He does not want fame.
That alone makes him a fascinating anomaly in the field of newfangled religions, or cults, as they are alternately and more appropriately known, where the whole point is to pretend that you have a direct line to the Almighty to separate rubes from their money.
In a corrupt world, there is a purity to Haze that sets him apart. It makes him an object of fascination as well as pity.
Early in the film Haze uses some of the money he saved fighting in an unspecified war to buy a lemon of an automobile. It’s a junker that seems like it was never new. It apparently rolled off the assembly line in a sad state of disrepair.
Haze knows damn well that he has bought a terrible car that barely works, but that does not keep him from stubbornly trying to drive it. He’s so bull-headed that he refuses to accept that he made a mistake in purchasing the worst automobile in human history.
O’Connor’s novel took place in 1952. Its protagonist is a World War II veteran who, like Joaquin Phoenix’s simpatico spiritual seeker from The Master, returned from WWII broken, lost, and desperate for direction and salvation.
John Huston’s uncompromising adaptation of O’Connor’s tricky religious satire takes place in the present, but its anti-hero is a man out of time. He looks like someone from a distant past in his stern black preacher's garb. It’s as if he’s black and white in a world that long ago switched to color.
While angrily preaching a Gospel only he seems to understand, Haze encounters his shadow self in Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton). The consummate phony pretends to be a preacher who blinded himself in a fit of religious frenzy.
He’s accompanied on his rounds by Sabbath Lily Hawks (Amy Wright), his spirited teenage daughter. Sabbath has a massive crush on Haze, but he is as uninterested in romance as he is in everything else that people are supposed to want in our society.
There’s a wonderful scene late in the film when Sabbath Lily Hawks tells him an ostensible secret as part of an unsuccessful attempt to woo Hokes. She informs the cracked American prophet that she’s a bastard child conceived in sin by a man who tries to pass himself off as a holy roller but who is a con man working the blind preacher grift.
The sketchy man’s randy daughter assumes that everyone knows her father is a fraud and a liar. However, Haze is so rigid in his thinking and naive about how the world works that his brain can’t comprehend what Lily understandably and rightly sees as glaringly apparent.
Dourif looks like the news that Asa is not what he pretends to be is so disillusioning and upsetting that it’s breaking his brain. The character’s gullibility is funny, but it’s also sad.
In his own weird way, Haze is innocent. He is genuinely shocked and upset to discover that things in this sick, sad, beautiful world are not what they appear to be.
He’s not a fake. He’s not a phony. In a world full of con men and women who use religion as a cynical tool, he is a true believer. He’s a zealot. He’s an extremist. He’s a spiritual seeker. He is a fool.
Haze is doing his thing, confusing and enraging strangers with his home-brewed form of heresy, when Hoover Shoates (Ned Beatty) sees him and is immediately inspired.
As a veteran con man, Hoover thinks he knows a grift when he sees one. So when Hoover sees Haze pontificating, he “Yes Ands” him by pretending to be a disciple and true believer in Haze’s teachings.
The cynical criminal is so confident that he can do dirty business with the preacher that he doesn’t even bother talking to him beforehand. He’s convinced, with reason, that even if Haze is an absolute stranger, he’d still be interested in anything that could make him money.
He is wrong. Haze is a goddamn unicorn in that he is an American who does not care about money or social standing, or anything other than pursuing a spiritual journey that seems to get fuzzier with time rather than sharper.
Haze is horrified rather than intrigued by the huckster. Hoover doesn’t care. He’s intent on exploiting Haze’s shtick whether he wants him to or not.
Since Haze won’t help him, Hoover decides to create his version of Haze, one he can control because he made him. William Hickey, who would get nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in John Huston’s 1985 mob comedy Prizzi’s Honor, plays a character billed only as “Preacher” who does what Hoover tells him to do.
Huston has a cameo as the hero’s evangelist grandfather. He was a brilliant character actor in addition to being a great writer and director who snagged some of the finest performances from some of our finest character actors, including Dourif.
Dourif’s unforgettable protagonist begins the film broken, angry, and filled with incoherent ambition. He’s in a furious hurry to make his mark on the world. He grows more and more unhinged until he has reached a place of suicidal insanity.
Stanton’s phony preacher merely pretends to blind himself. Dourif’s veteran blinds himself for reasons he doesn’t entirely understand. He may not believe in Christ but needs to suffer as Christ did.
He doesn’t stop punishing himself until he’s on the verge of death. He wraps his torso in barbed wire out of a sincere desire to experience the worst pain life has to offer.
Even by New Hollywood standards, this is a dark, uncompromising, perversely non-commercial character study.
I’m writing this on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration. It’s bleak. The whole world feels insane and wrong. Nothing makes sense anymore. It’s all too grim to bear. That’s why it’s comforting to experience a piece of art like Wise Blood, where the darkness and madness are fictional and comfortably in our past instead of real and in our present and future.
Nathan had life-changing but extremely expensive dental implants that he could not afford, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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