Saturday, August 27, 2011

Signs Without Wonders

Wise Blood (1979)
directed by John Huston
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Huston's good taste in books was routinely upset by his obsession with literary adaptations, and while I've been generous about some of them in the past, Wise Blood is a mess. Most of the absurdity that probably works on the page falls apart onscreen, but Macon, Georgia, and Brad Dourif - oh, and Harry Dean Stanton, because wherever you go, there he is - hold it together as long as they can. I'm not a religious man but I can respect a thoughtful struggle against the void. It goes some way in making sense of what people do, and why, not that any answer is ever clear.

But instead of the Doc Cochran I always want Dourif to be, there's an air of the overly serious actor in Hazel Motes, as if Dourif can't wait to arrive at the scene where he's blind. I get the same vibe from Richard Dreyfuss in The Jaws Log and Bryan Cranston anytime he talks about Walter White in interviews. Amy Wright is the real surprise, and her first unsuccessful seduction of Hazel is easily the movie's highlight. She reclines suggestively in a forest glade while Hazel impatiently ignores her. With each turn of her hips, the broken, dead leaves on the ground amass on her stockings, her dress, and her hair, until she rises like a victim from The Evil Dead, ravaged by the woods.

But that seems accidental, though I suppose it wasn't. Dan Shor roaming downtown in his stolen Gonga the Gorilla costume is sweet, but mostly due to the crowd of happy and expectant kids that surrounds him as he stands in line. I like the idea that the costume, once worn, might liberate him in a way that the shrunken corpse he steals from the city museum did not, and I do not accept that Gonga is merely a continuation of his feelings of isolation.