A World Without Pity Spawns a Fallen Son: An On Screen Adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Child of God’ ... Make no mistake: There is nothing pleasant about “Child of God,” James Franco’s very fine adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s short, pitiless novel. But then, Mr. McCarthy is a bard of the apocalyptic who, in his unsparing period novel “Blood Meridian” writes that “war is the truest form of divination.” His is no country for old men, to borrow the title of one of his few books that have been turned into a successful film; neither is it a place for bromides about the triumph of the human spirit, one reason most of the screen adaptations have failed. There isn’t a war per se in “Child of God,” just good and (mostly) evil in a Christ story in reverse about a mystery who becomes a man. The title character in “Child of God” is Lester Ballard — played by a ferocious Scott Haze with mad eyes and what sounds like a mouthful of marbles — a pariah in rural 1960s Tennessee who descends into madness and murder. Abandoned by a runaway mother and a father who hanged himself in the family barn, Lester lives in profound isolation. When the movie opens, he’s physically apart from a crowd of men and women, hunched and watching the auction of his house, which has been seized by the bank. When Lester threatens the auctioneer with his rifle, he’s hit on the head with an ax, a blow that leaves him bleeding on the ground and attendees open mouthed. “Lester Ballard never could hold his head right after that,” Mr. McCarthy writes. Mr. Franco follows Mr. McCarthy’s lead in setting this crucial scene, from the bluegrass band in the bed of a pickup to the gawking locals who have gathered, as if on a Sunday outing. In another story, the auction might be the scene’s meaningful event, the reason for its existence. But Lester is so weirdly bedraggled and menacing, and the ax swings so fast that your attention quickly moves from the auction to his appearance and then the blow. Instead of focusing on what is being done to Lester — through the violence of the sale, which will leave him homeless — your eyes and interest (much like the attendees) have settled on what Lester is doing, which is scaring people. This shift in focus mirrors the larger social dynamics in the story. Lester is the child of God in the title, “much like yourself perhaps,” Mr. McCarthy writes, although given his dim worldview, the “perhaps” strikes the ear as an all-important and jaundiced qualifier. But abandoned, shunned and just ignored, Lester is also a product of a fallen, all-too human world. Mr. Franco, who adapted the novel with Vince Jolivette, pares down that world, narrowing and depopulating it, doubtless because of budget constraints. The movie looks good, given those limitations, even with digital cinematography that never locates the sensual beauty and texture that might have better translated Mr. McCarthy’s full-bodied language into visual terms. What Mr. Franco does have is Mr. Haze, whose mesmerizing performance gives the movie its ballast and its fitful, nervous energy. Dirtied up and thinned down, he looks a sight, hunched and scrawny, more beast than man. (With his jaw tucked into his chest, the whites of his eyes shining, Mr. Haze initially also evokes Jack Nicholson.) Although Lester occasionally interacts with some locals, including the hostile sheriff, Fate (Tim Blake Nelson), and his deputy, Cotton (Jim Parrack), much of the time he’s alone, wandering along country roads and running through the woods. Lester also talks to the animals, some stuffed, and the corpse of a woman (Nina Ljeti) that he makes his lover, a turn that sets him and the story down a progressively gruesome yet humanizing path. In the novel “Child of God,” a man emits “a gout of yellow snot into the grass,” an image that Mr. Franco faithfully reproduces. Bodies ooze in Mr. McCarthy’s work, leaking mucus and sputtering blood: In “Blood Meridian,” another man grabs his nose and blows “two strings of snot onto the floor”; in “Outer Dark,” a woman sneezes “forth a spray of mucus.” There’s an intense visceral quality to these emanations, which are brute, vivid reminders of all the liquid sloshing around inside us (under our thin skins) and that could, at any moment, pour out. This is language that at its most specific and horrifically familiar reverberates in your body and that — as in this admirably tough and unapologetically ugly movie — is an assertion of a deep humanity. -- By Manhola Dargis, New York Times, JULY 31, 2014 More here: nytimes/2014/08/01/movies/an-on-screen-adaptation-of-cormac-mccarthys-child-of-god.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 12:32:37 +0000
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