Chew's Reviews - 'Child of God'
By Gary Chew | July 30, 2014 | If Lester Ballard's intelligence were to be measured by his will to survive, then this retard...
https://www.elkgrovenews.net/2014/07/child-of-god-movie-review.html
By Gary Chew | July 30,
2014 |
If Lester
Ballard's intelligence were to be measured by his will to
survive, then this
retarded and mentally disturbed man would be a
genius.
That's how
best I can describe this prominent character that was
hatched in the
unfathomable mind of the award-winning novelist, Cormac
McCarthy. His novel,
“Child of God,” tells a more than unsettling story of
Ballard in rural Tennessee
in the 1960s.
An orphan
of society, Lester (Scott Haze) is isolated from it and any
sense of societal
decency that might randomly come from it. He is
disconnected … no family, no
home, no significant other. This violent, barely coherent
soul exists outside
the comfortable margins of the civilized. His behavioral
level is not much above
that of a wild bear in the Appalachian woods.
Playing
Jerry, film actor James Franco has taken on the thankless
burden of putting
McCarthy's story to film. Not to suggest that McCarthy's
work shouldn't be
brought to the screen, let me just say: “Child of God” seems
to be the least
likely in McCarthy's oeuvre for a filmmaker. Consistently,
violence and outrage
play out. Less common anti-social acts are depicted … not
down to intimate
specificity … but plainly enough in order to make one aware
of what they are.
Here's the
list: human defecation in the wild; male masturbation
stimulated through
voyeuristic means while heterosexual intercourse takes place
nearby; and most
difficult for holding a steady eye to ... necrophilia.
“Shocking”
might be
the most concise description. Having seen so many movies
over the years ... long
ago, I stopped turning my head or shutting my eyes when
really disturbing scenes
appear … until last evening when I saw “Child of God.”
On the
other hand, I don't consider the Franco film to be awful,
although it has primitive
production values, causing one to think that the budget
could've only been
less than meager, and with only mediocre performances.
If you've
read any of Cormac McCarthy's novels, you might have felt
drawn in by the dark,
simple, primitive kinds of behavior that keep the author's
attention. His
characters are unadorned, yet face up to what
has-to-be-done in order to
survive ... like much of the , shall I say(?), civilized
population.
A
passage in one of
McCarthy's books or one that's written for a scene in a
movie could easily
contain a prehistoric ape tossing a large bone up high into
the sky. Moreover,
Lester Ballard and Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem in “No
Country For Old Men”)
have much in common … and so do the rest of us. But we mask
it better. I suppose
that's the reason Cormac McCarthy writes what he writes.
Copyright © 2014 by Gary Chew. All rights reserved.
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