Everything about this movie was supposed to be perfect, from the great American source novel of Flannery O'Connor, to the spot-on casting of Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty, and Harry Dean Stanton, to the direction of the legendary John Huston. So what went wrong? Answer: the very conception of how to tell this story. This was undoubtedly meant to be a vivid, colorful, literary, even surrealistic story of a man's personal obsession with and against the great excesses of Southern revivalist Christianity. A movie like this should have been made by someone with the visual flair of Tim Burton or the Coen Bros. Instead, it reminded me of an early Richard Linklater movie like "Slacker," following a meandering path of disconnected vignettes with Southern weirdos spouting their own idiosyncratic dialogue into thin air. Now, much of this dialogue is utterly hilarious and beautifully written (and supposedly verbatim from O'Connor's novel), but great dialogue alone does not a great film make.
A film like this could only have been made in the 1970s, an era when filmmakers could helm projects which tackled very taboo subject matter (in this case the mother of all of them - religion). It's a shame it could never be made by a major studio in today's politically-correct climate, because if done right it would make an amazing literary period-piece. Who is this main character Hazel Moates really? We get to seem him do a series of some of the most insane things in modern cinema (off-screen), yet we never get a real character exposition. If someone is going to make a serious multi-layered satire of religion, they had better be prepared to go places visually and aesthetically for the viewer, and this movie does not. In addition, when is this movie supposed to take place (the cars are all contemporary 1970s, yet O'Connor's era of itinerant revivalist preachers wearing suits and hats ended in the 1950s)? Finally, Alex North's twangy hillbilly score is probably the most aesthetically incorrect soundtrack ever, next to the kazoo-and-banjo score from "Last House on the Left."
A film like this could only have been made in the 1970s, an era when filmmakers could helm projects which tackled very taboo subject matter (in this case the mother of all of them - religion). It's a shame it could never be made by a major studio in today's politically-correct climate, because if done right it would make an amazing literary period-piece. Who is this main character Hazel Moates really? We get to seem him do a series of some of the most insane things in modern cinema (off-screen), yet we never get a real character exposition. If someone is going to make a serious multi-layered satire of religion, they had better be prepared to go places visually and aesthetically for the viewer, and this movie does not. In addition, when is this movie supposed to take place (the cars are all contemporary 1970s, yet O'Connor's era of itinerant revivalist preachers wearing suits and hats ended in the 1950s)? Finally, Alex North's twangy hillbilly score is probably the most aesthetically incorrect soundtrack ever, next to the kazoo-and-banjo score from "Last House on the Left."