★★★★
In a Macon teacup, mix Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic flair with John Huston’s unrelenting existentialism and you get Wise Blood, a small, American New Wave jewel. A lot of people think this is flawed film, but it seems tight and consistent to me. I think Huston chooses the Landlady at the end of the film as his directorial voice, and when she says, “The world’s an empty place,” she expresses the central truth that the characters in the movie have to cope with. This is not the catholic Flannery O’Connor’s film; it’s John Huston’s. And God doesn’t usually have a role in a Huston film.
Man struggles hard in these movies, but there’s little redemption or reward waiting a Huston hero. Sam Spade’s statue turns out to be a sham in Maltese Falcon, the surviving miners watch their gold dust blow away at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the drunk diplomat is killed in Under the Volcano, and Marilyn departs in The Misfits……and all after so much love, creativity, investment and fierce struggle. Hazel Motes is another in this line of Huston characters who strive mightily only to face a defeat which comes not from a character flaw but from the reality of a haphazard, empty universe. Hazel yearns for redemption but sees that the people and institutions who claim to have access to it are dishonest or simple. And in the end, even his solitary quest for righteousness fails because there is no higher authority to appease.
There’s no god in Wise Blood, as Asa Hawks and daughter Sabbath have long ago figured out. We see them hawking Jesus using the same techniques as the guy selling potato peelers at the beginning of the film; Asa even fakes having tried self-mutilation as a way to redemption, for if there’s no redemption to be had, there’s no point in suffering for it. This is the lesson that Hazel learns at the end of the film when he is blind, wrapped in barbed wire and unable to walk, delivered at last into the hands of a woman he doesn’t want to marry, the Landlady. She, of course, knows there’s nothing else, and her abiding concern is not to face the emptiness alone.
Lily, too, is more interested in relationships than god, so when Hazel gets too intense in his quest for righteousness, she abandons him and returns to her relationship with Asa. And another corrupt preacher, Hoover Shoates, recognizes a good gimmick when he sees one, so he steals Hazel’s ideas and applies his sales skills in hawking the new religion. Shoates and Hawks are two of a kind – both know there’s no god or redemption, but they make their living by cynically exploiting others’ desire for it.
In addition to the charlatans hawking salvation, Wise Blood provides a lonely simpleton. Enoch Emory is an engaging youth, but one who has mental problems. This hapless boy spends the film not trying to make contact with god but just trying to make contact with other human beings, all of whom reject him. It’s from him that the film gets its name because Enoch affirms that he knows things because of his “wise blood,” but as we last see him alone on a bench in a gorilla suit, his final comment is about trying to be friendly yet being rejected. Neither connectedness nor redemption is to be found in this film about the wise blood of a lonely fool.
It’s conceptual base notwithstanding, there are still some problems with this film. The stiff delivery of lines and the overwritten quality of the dialog may reference the original material, but those elements don’t make Wise Blood a more engaging film. And some complain about the blending of the 40s and the 70s in the film, though I find that provides the movie a less specific reference and doesn’t impact my enjoyment of the it.
This is a film to return to when, still today, the hypocrisy of religious discourse starts to grate. At such a time, it’s comforting to sit down with a movie whose main character maintains, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”
