JESUS' SON
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Lions Gate Films Director: Alison Maclean Writer: Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia, Oren Moverman, book by Denis Johnson Cast: Billy Crudup, Samantha Morton, Denis Leary, Jack Black, Will Patton, Greg Germann, Holly Hunter, Dennis Hopper
People who dug Mary Harron's movie "American Psycho" may have enjoyed the witty take on violence or the satiric edge by which the story condemned the rampant yuppie materialism of the 1980s. Some of us who lived through the seventies and eighties look nostalgically at the unique era of the early 1970s when not moneyk, but hippies, love and hallucinogenic drugs were the fashion of the times. We forget the suffering and waste of that interval, the drug- induced pain that led to the downfall of the epoch of peace and love. Alison Maclean remembers, as does Denis Johnson who wrote the best-selling episodic novel from which the movie "Jesus' Son" is adapted.
"Jesus' Son" is about losers. The story hones in on one particular screw-up who earned the nickname FH from those who came into contact with him. As FH, the roguishly handsome Billy Crudup--last seen with the dazzling Jennifer Connelly in the critically mixed "Waking the Dead"-- dominates every scene of this metaphoric and literal road trip that takes him from Iowa to Phoenix and takes his mind from a device that he seems to have mislaid to a credible rehabilitation. FH drifts from youthful destructiveness to mature redemption when he learns compassion for those in worse shape than he.
The story is narrated by FH in the non-linear mode that we'd expect of a person who might be sitting next to you on a barstool in an alcoholic haze, relating incidents from the present time to, say, five years ago, moving up a couple of years, then back again, and finally returning to the present. Filled with the exaggerations you'd expect from such a barfly and with the occasional exploiting of the surreal, "Jesus' Son" unfolds the story of a man whose life is redeemed partly by his love for Michelle (Samantha Morton), a heroin addicted woman desperate for love, and ultimately by a job he takes in a home for assisted living.
Like any road movie, "Jesus' Son" takes its protagonist through a series of adventures with bizarre characters, allowing him to act out in his own peculiar way. In each case he works to save the people he meets but ends up mimicking the functioning of these losers, and failing because his competence takes a back seat to his conviction. The funniest scene takes place in a hospital where he takes a barely defined job and runs into an orderly, Georgie (Jack Black), who boosts his meager salary by helping himself to perks--like the pharmacy closet which is stacked with pills that make the man even zanier than he is in real life. (Recall, if you will, Jack Black's role as a record salesman in Stephen Frears' "High Fidelity" and you get the picture.) He meets and hangs out for a while with a depressed divorcee, Wayne (Denis Leary), whose idea of revenge is to destroy his own home and extract the copper wiring for re-sale. In a small role, Greg Germann performs as Dr. Shamis, whose incompetence reflects FH's and is the physician we all know, while Dennis Hopper turns in a poignant role as Bill, who winds up in a nursing home after being shot in the face by his latest wife.
Samantha Morton, who most effectively played the role of a mute woman in Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown," is somehow less productive this time around, perhaps because her addiction to shooting up lacks the subtlety of her guise in the Woody Allen work, but as FH's first genuine love, she engenders in her man the desire to reclaim someone outside of himself--while Mira (Holly Hunter) finishes the job of saving FH from his feelings of emptiness .
Whereas Billy Crudup as Franklin Pierce in "Waking the Dead" is a man climbing the career ladder to an eventual Senate seat, this time around he plays to type but as the more prosaic guy who is just trying to get his act together and live like all the normal people he assumes are leading happy lives with their families. In his relationship with the only person who remains with him spiritually throughout the film, Michelle, he reminds us of yet another of the many recent films about drug and alcohol addiction, Mike Figgis's "Leaving Las Vegas," even more than it does about those more ostensibly about the drug scene such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," "Trainspotting," and, most recently, "Groove." Alison Maclean's treatment of this lost Everyman inspires hope in all of us, making effective use of sometimes outrageous humor while simultaneously shunning cheap sentimentalism.
Rated R. Running time: 107 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews