Aesthetics raise a pulpy story to beautiful heights

Rating: 10/10 (8 December 2003)

The cosmology of `The Exorcist' is so conservative it's almost embarrassing--this story takes place in a world of absolute good and absolute evil, where the bad guys are supernatural monsters who attack children and the good guys wear black suits with white collars. For all its legendary shock value, it's really about as subversive and blasphemous as a Sunday-school pageant, and in another director's hands, it could easily have verged into the preachy, campy territory that `Bless the Child' would explore almost thirty years later. But William Friedkin works something of a minor miracle with his pulpy, didactic material. Like Francis Ford Coppola did with `The Godfather,' he takes a fundamentally stupid and obvious story and uses style to transform it into something brilliant. And truly, `The Exorcist' is an aesthetic marvel, with Friedkin's incredible sense of rhythm and timing apparent everywhere. The early scenes establishing the characters are so flatly scripted, they might as well have no dialogue at all, but the director's detached, almost voyeuristic approach makes them seem authentic rather than clunky. We feel we are seeing banal slices of these characters' lives, and that's what makes the introduction of the vulgar, loud, stylized demon so jarring. In fact, the film works best as a study in contrasts--long scenes of great stillness are punctuated with moments of sudden violence and grotesqueness, and the result is not an effect of mere surprise, but real sensory horror. Friedkin's use of sound is great too, not just in Mercedes McCambridge's famously foulmouthed performance, but in such sudden startling touches as a phone ringing, or something rustling in the attic, or a woman's voice suddenly speaking with a Greek accent. (Both the sound and the unusual pacing suggest the Roman Polanski of `Repulsion' and `Rosemary's Baby.') As for the acting, it's fine across the board, with Jason Miller standing out as the weary antihero Damien Karras. Whether the film is scary seems to be much a matter of personal taste, but even if you aren't frightened, it's hard to deny the staggering beauty of the filmmakers' expression here. 10 out of 10.