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| Brad Dourif in Wise Blood |
Cast: Brad Dourif, Dan Shor, Harry Dean Stanton, Amy Wright, Mary Nell Santacroce, Ned Beatty, William Hickey, John Huston. Screenplay: Benedict Fitzgerald, Michael Fitzgerald, based on a novel by Flannery O'Connor. Cinematography: Gerry Fisher. Film editing: Roberto Silvi. Music: Alex North.
John Huston's Wise Blood is a classic example of the difficulty of translating a novel to film. With only a few small deviations from the plot, the screenplay by Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald sticks closely to Flannery O'Connor's novel, but it misses the effect of O'Connor's prose, characterization, tone, and point of view on the reader. The novel is one kind of experience, an immersion in O'Connor's private imaginings and her particular religious beliefs and sensibility. The film is another, a puzzling, exasperating, sometimes tiresome tale of eccentric people in a setting familiar to moviegoers, the Southern small town. That the film is its own thing apart from any resemblance to the novel it was drawn from is suggested by the casting. Huston originally wanted Tommy Lee Jones to play Hazel Motes, with Brad Dourif in the role of Enoch Emory. It's hard to imagine two actors with more different personae than the tough, bullish Jones and the weedy, vulnerable Dourif. But when Jones became unavailable, Dourif was cast in the part, and Hazel Motes became something quite different. Wise Blood has many admirers, but there are those of us who find it weighed down by Southern Gothic clichés and ambiguous in intent. Is it a satire on the excesses of evangelical Protestantism? An exploration of religious fanaticism, or a demonstration of the weakening hold of religious belief? Or just an incoherent collection of oddball characters with unusual fixations doing unlikely things?
