Product: Jesus' Son [VHS]
Rating: 3.0
Three stars for the three Ds
Some kind of argument could be made that there are just two types of writing: 1) writing that should remain forever and only writing and 2) writing that might, perhaps, be adapted to another form. Denis Johnson's stupefyingly splendiferous collection of short stories, Jesus' Son, is I think writing of the first type. It seems a shame then that Alison Maclean and her team of scriptwriters didn't bear this distinction in mind before attempting to turn these incandescent stories--or parts of them at any rate--into a motion picture. Effhead, the unforgettably soulful and yearning junkie narrator of the book's eleven stories, is here drained of all humour, mystery and depth, neutered in fact, carelessly and even dismisively rendered as no more than some kind of dissolute young simpleton. Sigh. Overall I'd have to say that Maclean's movie made me want to throw darts at the screen but there are actually three good, if minor, reasons to watch this otherwise craptacular adaptation: the brief glimpse you get of Johnson himself playing the hapless dude who walks into the hospital emergency room with the knife sticking out of his eye, the character acting of a surprisingly strong Denis Leary in the section dealing with the story Work, and the part where the great Dennis Hopper is being "interviewed" while getting a shave and a haircut. That's two Denises and one Dennis and despite some laudatory palaver about Samantha Morton's overly-indulged performance--overly-indulged I might add by both Morton herself AND the female filmmaker--these three Ds were the slender and only hooks for me. Really though, this film bears so little relation to the book by Denis Johnson that I think it should be retitled "Forrest Gump Shoots Up" or "Jesus' Daughter-In-Law." The impulse to celebrate the work of a deeply gifted American writer is a worthy one but surely Mr. Johnson deserves better than this dumbed-down and feminised sleight-of-hand.