Jesus' Son
USA/Canada 1999
Reviewed by Danny Leigh
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Iowa City, the early 70s. Fuckhead, or FH, a drug addict in his early twenties, is involved in a car crash while hitchhiking. He returns to his apartment and is visited by his ex-girlfriend Michelle. He then reminisces about his life so far, starting with his first meeting with Michelle at a party. Ignoring the attentions of her boyfriend McInnes, Michelle seduces Fuckhead. Months after the party, the two move in together and nurture their heroin habits. McInnes is shot by one of his house mates; he's driven to hospital by Fuckhead, but dies on the way.
Fuckhead and Michelle move into a cheap hotel. Fuckhead agrees to help Wayne, an alcoholic, strip a derelict house for salvage. Having made $40, the two men buy heroin. That evening, both overdose: Wayne dies, but Fuckhead is revived by Michelle. Fuckhead gets a job at a hospital, where he and his colleague Georgie steal various medication; later, Georgie saves a patient's life. Tripping, Fuckhead and Georgie drive into the country. When Fuckhead returns home, Michelle tells him she is pregnant. The baby is aborted. Michelle leaves Fuckhead for another man.
Following his car crash, Fuckhead gets back together with Michelle. After arguing with Fuckhead, Michelle dies from an overdose. Grief-stricken, Fuckhead overdoses himself, and is sent to a rehab clinic. Five months later, he is working at a hospice in Arizona; there, he finds peace among his terminally ill charges.
Review
For a director as seemingly talented as Alison Maclean, the seven years since her last feature - the taut, unsettling Crush (1992) - must have been hard to endure. She spent some of the time working in US television, on such series as Homicide Life on the Street and Sex and the City. But Jesus' Son shows how much she relishes her return to cinema. With its exquisitely muted colours, its aura of woozy narcosis and its defiantly fractured narrative, Jesus' Son pointedly resembles a compendium of things you're not allowed to do on mainstream television. And if her main aim was to get as far as possible from network strictures, what better source material could she have than Denis Johnson's 1992 collection of short stories, addled, disjointed tales about a young herion addict and his drifter friends?
Yet fitfully faithful as Maclean and screenwriters Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia and Oren Moverman are to Johnson's smacked-out lyricism, it emerges here as something of a mixed blessing. On paper Johnson's fleeting insights are immaculate, peppering a bottomless, opiate, first-person fugue. And the temptation to have Billy Crudup's drug addict Fuckhead simply recite chunks of interior monologue has not been resisted. But while Crudup's recitations sound great, they often leave the film looking uncomfortably like an illustrated narration. The sense of displacement is almost too palpable. Maclean can't seem to make up her mind between honouring the skewed nature of Johnson's vignettes - by punctuating each segment with title cards - and trying to mould them into a coherent, viewer-friendly narrative. Take, for instance, the key character of Michelle. Despite Samantha Morton's fine, funky performance she seems an arbitrary and strangely hollow figure. It quickly becomes clear that her role is a composite of Johnson's numerous anonymous female characters, one designed to bind several threads into a conventional storyline.
Yet this hesitancy hardly negates the otherwise astute and idiosyncratic charms of Jesus' Son. Maclean's camera perfectly captures a mood of euphoric listlessness which is at once a homage to Johnson and a tribute to her and her team's sensitivities. If the scriptwriting mechanics of unifying Johnson's yarns prove troublesome, the potentially jarring disparities in tone are handled with greater ease. The film segues seamlessly from absurdist comedy (Crudup blankly watching a naked middle-aged woman paragliding), to documentary detail (Denis Leary's broken alcoholic Wayne mopping up a spilt scotch, then sucking on the napkin) to understated tragedy (his subsequent death from an OD). In a medium increasingly confused by the idea of pushing more than one emotional button at once, Maclean's fluency is startling, and her images achieve a cracked, off-kilter kind of beauty.
Her handling of heroin, though indulgent in terms of screen time, is otherwise strictly matter-of-fact. Rather than the ostentatious fetishism of drugs chic in, say, Trainspotting or Drugstore Cowboy, smack here is as regular and uneventful an activity as eating. People get high; sometimes they die. This uncondescending fatalism means that, when a doped-up Fuckhead wanders through a drive-in showing the 1962 horror film Carnival of Souls convinced he's actually in a vast, sprawling cemetery, the effect is captivating.
All of which is enhanced by the accomplishment of the performances. Billy Crudup is a dazed, ruined presence whose poise gives the project its anguished heart. The supporting turns - particularly Morton, Leary and the inspired Jack Black - are equally impressive. The sublime interplay between Black and Crudup in the darkly comic segment 'Emergency', set in a blood-soaked casualty ward ("What am I gonna do about these fuckin' shoes, man? Listen to how they squish..."), is just one memorable scene in a film of many. Moments such as these leave you hoping Maclean doesn't have to wait another seven years for her next big-screen outing.
Credits
- Director
- Alison Maclean
- Producers
- Elizabeth Cuthrell
- Lydia Dean Pilcher
- David Urrutia
- Screenplay
- Elizabeth Cuthrell
- David Urrutia
- Oren Moverman
- Based on the book by
- Denis Johnson
- Director of Photography
- Adam Kimmel
- Editors
- Geraldine Peroni
- Stuart Levy
- Production Designer
- David Doernberg
- Music
- Joe Henry
- ©Jesus' Son Financing, L.P.
- Production Companies
- Alliance Atlantis and Lions Gate Films present an Evenstar Films production
- Executive Producer
- Steven Tuttleman
- Co-producer
- Margot Bridger
- Associate Producer
- Oren Moverman
- Production Supervisor
- George Paaswell
- Production Co-ordinators
- Benjamin Goldberg
- Arizona Crew:
- Antonio Sánchez
- Unit Production Manager
- Arizona Crew:
- Carlos Moore
- Location Managers
- Joe Kelly
- Arizona Crew:
- Norma Kraus
- Post-production Supervisors
- George Paaswell
- Jasmine Kosovic
- 2nd Unit Director
- Lydia Dean Pilcher
- Assistant Directors
- Robert Warren
- Dylan Hopkins
- Arizona Crew:
- Eric Tignini
- Script Supervisor
- Sonya Klimuk
- Casting
- Directors:
- Laura Rosenthal
- Ali Farrell
- Philadelphia Locations:
- Mike Lemon Casting
- Diane Heery
- Camera Operator
- Alicia Weber
- Visual Effects
- Jeffrey Cox
- Digital Effects/Animation
- Blue Sky Studios Inc
- Rain and Snow Effects
- John Burzichelli
- Hill Studios
- Art Director
- Andrea Stanley
- Set Decorator
- Geri Radin
- Costume Designer
- Kasia Walicka Maimone
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Natalya Khorover
- Key Make-up Artist
- Nicki Ledermann
- Key Hairstylist
- Gianna Sparacino
- Title Design
- Bureau.com
- Opticals
- János Pilenyi
- Cineric Inc
- Original Score Musicians
- Bass:
- Jennifer Condos
- Drums/Percussion:
- Curt Bisquera
- Guitar:
- Gregg Arreguin
- Keyboards:
- Jamie Muhoberac
- Trumpet:
- Brian Schwartz
- Tin Drum Session Musicians
- Eliot Bailen
- Jennifer Green
- Ragnhildur Pétursdóttir
- J. Russo
- Gerald Beal
- Dan Goebel
- Hanna Tennen
- Whip
- Music Supervisor
- Randall Poster
- Music Co-ordinator
- Christopher S. Parker
- Music Editor
- Annette Kudrak
- Music Mixing Engineer
- Rick Will
- Additional Music Production
- Max Lichtenstein
- Music Consultant
- Denis Johnson
- Soundtrack
- "Surf Buggy" - Dick Dale & His Del-Tones; "Sweet Pea" - Tommy Roe; "Mute", "Big Pill" - Camphor; "Yes, I'm Ready" - Barbara Mason; "The Iowa Waltz" - Greg Brown; "Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)" - Paul Revere and The Raiders; "Last Date" - Floyd Cramer; "Lover's Holiday" - Peggy Scott, Jo Jo Benson; "(Is Anybody Going to) San Antone?" - Doug Sahm; "She's a Jar" - Wilco; "The Ballad of the Green Beret" - Barry Sadler; "Ooby Dooby", "Airline to Heaven" - Wilco; "Main Title Theme (Billy)" - Bob Dylan; "Hang On Sloopy" - The McCoys; "The Love You Save" - Joseph Accrington; "Cowgirl in the Sand" - Neil Young; "Soul Dressing" - Booker T. and the M.G.s; "The Family That Prays", "Satan Is Real" - The Louvin Brothers; "Unchain My Heart" - Joe Henry; "Farther Along" - Christine Mourad; "Misty Blue" - Dorothy Moore; "The Circular Hallway" - Gerald Beal, Hanna Tennen, Eliot Bailen; "Sweet Desire" - The Kendalls
- Production Sound Mixers
- John Gooch
- Arizona Crew:
- Michael Cottrell
- Re-recording Mixer
- Reilly Steele
- Planet 10 Post Co-ordinator
- Danielle Capawanna
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Warren Shaw
- Dialogue Editors
- Dan Korintus
- Sylvia Menno
- Rick Freeman
- Sound Effects Editors
- Paul P. Soucek
- William Sweeney
- ADR
- Engineers:
- David Boulton
- Bobby Johanson
- Editor:
- Kenton Jakub
- Foley
- Artist:
- Brian Vancho
- Engineer:
- Joe Dohner
- Editor:
- Jeffrey Stern
- Narcotics Consultant
- James Moffit
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Douglas Crosby
- Film Extract
- Carnival of Souls (1962)
- Cast
- Billy Crudup
- FH
- Samantha Morton
- Michelle
- Denis Leary
- Wayne
- Jack Black
- Georgie
- Will Patton
- John Smith
- Greg Germann
- Doctor Shanis
- Holly Hunter
- Mira
- Dennis Hopper
- Bill
- Robert Michael Kelly
- salesman
- Torben Brooks
- car crash driver
- Dierdre Lewis
- driver's wife
- Jimmy Moffit
- car crash doctor
- Antoinette Lavecchia
- dead man's wife
- Steve Buck
- Richard
- Ben Shenkman
- Tom
- Scott Oster
- Stan
- Brooke Shive
- Beatle
- Mark Webber
- Jack Hotel
- John Ventimiglia
- McInnes
- Jesse Weaver Jr
- Carl
- Mike Shannon
- Dundun
- Todd Berry
- Bill Thompson
- college kids
- Elizabeth Cuthrell
- diner waitress
- Joanne Bradley
- Mary
- Evita Sobel
- bartender
- Ronald Croy
- big guy in fight
- Yvette Mercedes
- E.R. nurse
- Denis Johnson
- Terrance Weber
- Christine Mourad
- ICU nurse
- John Clement
- medical assistant
- Katie Rimmer
- ICU nurse 2
- Carol Florence
- abortion clinic nurse
- Ron Van Lieu
- counsellor
- Alan Davidson
- Snakeskin
- William Salera
- man in laundromat
- Miranda July
- black-eyed nurse
- Omar Koury
- E.R. doctor
- Lee Golden
- Isaac
- Boris McGiver
- Max
- Susanne Case-Sulby
- Beverly Home head nurse
- Kevin Carroll
- Chris
- Michael Bove
- interpreter
- Clista Townsend
- David Tuttleman
- AA people
- Rebecca Kimball
- Mennonite woman
- David Urrutia
- Mennonite husband
- Christine Cowin
- young nurse
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Alliance Releasing (UK)
- 9,695 feet
- 107 minutes 44 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- Colour by
- Technicolor
- Super 35 [2.35:1]