Wise Blood (Huston, 1979)

Wise Blood (John Huston, 1979)

"I don't have to run away from anything, cause I don't believe in anything."

Some films can easily be identified as a book that is adapted from a novel. I figured this out instantly with "Wise Blood". Well, the main reason was that it mentioned that in the credits, but even without using my detective skills at that stage, it would have been obvious. Adaptations sometimes feel like a summary of the work. It is obviously like that in "Wise Blood". It does not really FEEL right.

The story is one Hazel Botes, young man returned from a war to a small Southern town. He is a very angry young man, with religious backgrounds, of which he rejects them all now. He rejects them with such a passion that one can easily add to it, he doth protest too much, me thinks. Hazel is like a fundamentalist atheist, so passionate about the fact that they don't believe in something that not only do they have to tell everyone, but that you also have a sneaking suspicion that deep down, they do believe in it.

Hazel sets out to start his own church called, The Church of Christ Without Christ, "Where the blind can't see, the lame don't walk, and the dead stay that way." In his premise, there exists several colorful characters, the blind preacher who isn't blind, her slutty daughter, a boy that tries to desperately befriend Hazel, an opportunist that find's Hazel's church idea a good one and tries to copy it, and so on. But they all seem like they would be more interesting in the book, because here they are just quick brush strokes, without any sense of reason. I assume that in the book they were given much more attention so that the whole thing makes more sense, or even if it does make sense in the movie, to give a sort of depth to it. In the film, as expected, Hazel does a 180 and suddenly becomes very religious, but in the movie, it seems abrupt.

2/5