Jesus' Son ***
Rated on a 4-star scale Screening venue: Cornerhouse (Manchester) Released in the UK by Fox on July 7, 2000; certificate 18; 109 minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Alison Maclean; produced by Elizabeth Cuthrell, Lydia Dean Pilcher, David Urrutia. Written by Elizabeth Cuthrell, Oren Moverman, David Urrutia; based on the book by Denis Johnson. Photographed by Adam Kimmel; edited by Stuart Levy, Geraldine Peroni.
CAST..... Billy Crudup..... FH Samantha Morton..... Michelle Denis Leary..... Wayne Jack Black..... Georgie Will Patton..... John Smith Greg Germann..... Dr. Shanis Holly Hunter..... Mira Dennis Hopper..... Bill
What we have here is one of the year's most difficult films -- from a film critic's point of view. "Jesus' Son" is effortless to watch and hard to recall. That was fine when I was in the cinema, but now I'm at the keyboard, trying to convince you to see it, and all I can recall is loosely tied together events, sections that seem wandered into and inexplicable decisions by the characters.
But that is as it should be. This is the story of a young man who starts out a wanderer and then becomes a drug addict. Neither of these phases could be said to have reason or meaning. Still they are hypnotic to watch.
We know the guy only as 'FH'. You can pretty much guess what that stands for. It rhymes with "duck bed". He and some other anonymous buddies, who shuffle around a small Midwestern town in the early 1970s, drift through houses, bars and other unofficial hangouts. At one of these, FH (Billy Crudup) meets Michelle (Samantha Morton), a fascinating, quiet, petite girl who soon takes him to bed for surprisingly tender lovemaking. The morning after, he finds her injecting heroin at the breakfast table. He has never seen anyone shoot up before, but seems curiously unaffected by it, is enough of a vacuum to try it for himself, and soon finds that the narcotic is running his life.
Up to and after this development, "Jesus' Son" refuses to adopt traditional story structure. It is as meandering as many of the films from the time in which it is set, and indeed has even been photographed in the cheaply crisp and colourful style of a thirty-year old road movie. Moments of tragedy and comic absurdity all unfold at the same pace, side by side, seen by the idle camera as they would be through FH's glazed eyes. There is a harrowing split-screen comparison of two junkies' overdoses resulting in different fates. A Jarmuschian moment in a hospital where two stoned orderlies deal with a patient complaining of "knife in the head". Psychedelic drug fantasies wander onto the screen without warning. And yet not once does the sound design louden, the pace of the editing quicken, or the camera swerve.
I'm not exactly praising the discipline of the director, Alison Maclean, but more her courage to let the material move so stubbornly. The amazing thing is that we don't notice the rigid construction -- Maclean's tactics work wonderfully, and we get involved in FH's haze. Billy Crudup is well cast in the role -- he has the gift of keeping his body language technically lifeless while always looking like he's about to speak. He convinces us that FH is going nowhere, but still lets us hope for him; his eyes and mouth achieve a weird limbo that suggest they may spring into action at any time.
Strange, then, that the third act of "Jesus' Son" doesn't work. This portion of the picture is easy to remember, because in boring us, it breaks the hypnotic spell of the earlier passages. The screenwriters try to let fresh air run into the story, as FH finds redemption; but Maclean keeps up the quirky, cloudy ambience. FH's life starts to flow, but the narrative doesn't, and it feels wrong to see the film's closing events portrayed with a lack of focus, because in them FH finally opens his eyes.
COPYRIGHT(c) 2000 Ian Waldron-Mantgani http://members.aol.com/ukcritic
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