Wise Blood

[This post written for the John Huston Blog-A-Thon at Icebox Movies]

When Adam Zanzie over at Icebox Movies commissioned his blogathon for John Huston, my unfamiliarity with the director's work both compelled me to join in for the purposes of education and to refrain in order to leave analysis to those who had actually analyzed the director. Indeed, Adam's entire retrospective hinges on the question of Huston's status as either an auteur or a studio hand, someone who moved from project to project and was simply damn good at handling whatever landed on his desk. I cannot say whether Huston was an auteur, for I have seen few of the director's films, and the ones that I have were seen so long ago as to be a faint memory, only The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre sticking in my mind with clarity.

But to play along with the overall conceit of Adam's blogathon, and to give myself a springboard, I mulled over the overarching question almost immediately by considering the subject of his 1979 film, Wise Blood. Huston started in the industry as a screenwriter, yet a closer look at his credits reveals that many of his directed films were adaptations. He sorted out the twists and turns of The Maltese Falcon, Huston's first time behind the camera, into a sharply defined portrait that brought out the core of the Sam Spade character and then matched that character so perfectly to Humphrey Bogart that the actor built his career off the role. But that was only the start: Huston would direct numerous other adaptations, some he reworked himself, others refashioned by hired screenwriters. A number of these adaptations came from hit novels of fleeting popularity, but look at some of the authors Huston reworked: Dashiell Hammett. Melville. Joyce. Arthur Miller. Flannery O'Connor. These are not ordinary writers but some of the finest of the last two centuries.

I bring this up because there occasionally rises the question of whether an artist can stake claim to being an auteur by working with the products of auteurs in other media. As Hitchcock told Truffaut, he would never adapt a literary masterpiece because he could not improve upon a work that was already a magnum opus, and furthermore that all great works of art are great because they cannot be separated from their medium. Now, plenty of accepted auteurs, including Hitch, didn't write their own movies, but they also left identifiable stamps on their work and carried pet themes with them, turning the written words of others into finished products that looked and sounded like artistic trademarks. It has long been my belief that such an effect, reliant entirely upon the execution of the film, demonstrates that a great film can be made from a great book, provided the director brings his or her own creative stamp to the material.

Watching Wise Blood, Huston's adaptation of O'Connor's first novel, I knew immediately that, whether an auteur or not, the director clearly envisioned the source material in his own way. The Gothic surreality of O'Connor, incidentally my favorite writer, does not inform the aesthetic of Huston's film. Instead, he delivers her grotesquerie in stark, realistic terms, colored in dusty yellows and rusted reds. O'Connor's occurs in the beginning of the 1950s as everyone returns home from Korea and lingering assignments to new Army bases in Germany and Japan, but as can be plainly seen in her passage, the economic recovery wasn't as complete as simplified history would have us believe. Deep in the South, faded billboards and broken-down cars litter towns populated by impoverished zombies; you would think from looking at such sights that America had lost the war and the Axis had nuked us instead.

Huston, on the other hand, sets the story in contemporary late-'70s America, choosing to shoot the film in Macon, Ga., mere miles from O'Connor's hometown in Baldwin County yet completely overhauling the setting. The effect, however, remains much the same: the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America is if anything more intimidating and lost than in the economic boom of the '50s. O'Connor's novel questions the commercialization of religion, making the time of Huston's choosing, just before the Me Generation would vote for Reagan and spend the next decade in pure capitalist bliss, all the more appropriate for the subject material.

Following an opening set of black-and-white still photos of perfunctory evangelical messages pasted on signs across the South (including one on a Dairy Queen marquee), Huston begins the film proper with a shot of Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), freshly returned from serving in the Army, standing in the middle of a barren street in a small town and hitches a ride with the first (and only) car that passes. Hazel remembers a dirt road in the place of this interstate highway they ride on, and the driver informs him that it's just been paved, and that it's been there just long enough for everyone in town to have driven away on it. Upon reaching his old family home, Motes finds it deserted and heads out back to see a headstone bearing the name of his grandfather, a tent revival preacher who raised him. Suddenly, Hazel's demeanor changes completely.

Rather than give himself to grief, Hazel looks liberated but also unhinged. He buys a train ticket to the nearest city, Taulkinham, and he tells several people, "I'm gonna do some things I ain't done before" with dark conviction. The first sign of what might be motivating Motes comes in the form of a flashback to his grandfather's fiery sermons, but his true state of mind starts to clarify when he buys a suit and hat that make him look like a preacher, only to viciously lash out at those who mistake him for one. "I ain't no preacher," he tells a cab driver with such force that you worry Hazel might strike the man, who unwisely continues to press the point until Dourif draws his mouth so tight that he's nearly hissing through closed lips that "I don't believe in anything."

To this the cabbie wryly responds, "That's the problem with preachers. They've all gotten too good to believe in anything." It's a sharp line, but it perfectly sets up the city into which Hazel wades. Populous but spare, Taulkinham is dotted with churches and those religious billboards, yet no one in town seems to care anything for Jesus. A blind man, Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton), wades into a crowd gathered by a salesman and starts begging for "dollars for Jesus." But the salesman is simply enraged that someone else would try to steal his crowd, though the gathered people are just as uninterested in giving to charity as they are buying the vendor's unimpressive potato peeler. Surrounded by rusted entreaties to the Lord, no one in town actually cares enough about religion to contribute to a blind preacher. This apathy is recalled throughout the film, particularly in a scene where Hazel stops in the middle of the road to glare at a "Jesus saves!" message on a rock until traffic builds behind him. When a man gets out of his car to ask Motes to move, the young man can only seethe at the rock and tell the man of his religious hatred. The other driver doesn't react at all, only repeating his request. Even in the Bible Belt, where people always talk of their religion and constantly air grievances over breaches of their delicate sensibilities, no one seems to mind outright atheism.

Yet Jesus still holds a certain draw over people, and Motes cannot abide to see Him lingering in the minds of others as He does in the man's own. So, Hazel elects to form his own religion, the "Church Without Christ," one that promises not to burden mankind with ideas of original sin, thus circumventing the need for a Christ figure to save us. For Hazel, raised by his fire-and-brimstone grandfather to have such fear for original sin -- which the old man illustrated by hiring a stripper to play Eve -- that he often wet himself in sermons and placed rocks in his shoes as a means of constant punishment and atonement, Jesus has become representative of sin. If Jesus existed in order to die for sin, than a denial of his existence allows one to believe that humanity does not have to atone for damnation.


It sounds optimistic, but O'Connor, possibly the most openly religious great author of the modern age, would never allow such a sunny view of atheism to hold sway. In her novel, as it is in the film, Hazel's crusade against Christ brings him closer to Him than ever, albeit in the most horrific manner possible. For the author, atheism cannot work because Jesus acts as the balancing act for the world's evils; without him, mankind has no guide outside of the sins of the flesh, sins that Hazel ironically embraces for all of his preaching against their existence. He shacks up with a prostitute, a bloated mess whose seductive pull over Hazel and several others may be the result of her gluttony appealing to their sense of greed. Sabbath Lily, Asa's daughter, appears virtuous and plain, but this is just an act, and she reveals her true nature to Motes by writhing on the ground in unbound sexuality like an unsaved Mary Magdalene, or perhaps the snake in the Garden of Eden.

Yet where Hazel cannot see his own sin, those around him commit various transgressions knowingly. Asa only pretends that he cannot see, having promised to blind himself with lye to win converts and donations years earlier. Sabbath Lily uses her virginal look merely to heighten her sexual appeal. Even Enoch Emory, the young, lonely man who follows Hazel out of loneliness, has a darker side to him, pursuing a human connection to the point of desperation (though Huston replaces Enoch's creepy isolation with comic relief in the film's most glaring flaw). People pay as much attention to Hazel's sermons as they do of proper Christian services, but a preacher named Hoover Shoats (Ned Beatty) spots Motes railing from his car hood and decides to promote the man. Part of Hazel's new religion stresses that you don't need to donate money, and Shoats demonstrates why the young man feels so strongly about this when he jumps in front of Motes and starts working the crowd into giving him money. This preacher sees dollar signs, commercializing Hazel's deeply personal attempt to purge himself of his childhood trauma and tainting this new religion the same way that Shoats and people like him ruined Christianity.

Here the lines between O'Connor, the deeply committed Catholic, and Huston, an equally adamant atheist, meet. Huston attempts to define Motes through existential terms: first he dresses like a preacher, then adopts the role to fit the suit. Later, he begins to morph into a new Christ and changes accordingly. For O'Connor, atheism may be a flawed state of being, maybe even irreconcilable with the nature of metaphysics and the supernatural, but she paints men like Hawks and Shoats as no less vile than Hazel, and even a great deal worse. These snake oil salesmen make their living not by rejecting God but by redefining Him to sell a product. As Hoover says in the book regarding Motes' Church Without Christ, "It's based on your own personal interpitation [sic] of the Bible, friends. You can sit at home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpited." By denying God, Hazel at least has a clear idea of what the deity supposedly is, while Shoats encourages people to convert by sacrificing nothing and forcing God to bend to the rules set by each individual. (Could O'Connor's outlook in 1952 have been any more prescient to the age of the televangelist, of Bible outlets of various translations and of marketed salvation?) When Hazel attempts to cast off the man, Shoats rallies and tells him that he'll simply find someone to play Motes' prophet and run him out of "business." "What you need is a little competition."

Every O'Connor story contains a moment of "grace" -- in a loose, violent, Catholic sense -- and her fury toward Shoats is adroitly conveyed when she hinges Hazel's own moment, or one of them, on the murder of the man Shoats dresses up like Motes. A horrific play on the Cleansing of the Temple, Hazel may well be acting as God's agent in destroying the man, purging the world of a false prophet and setting the man on his path to becoming a perverted vision of Christ before Jesus, in Huston's own, direct terms, "wins."

Working in his more sober style, Huston cannot possibly see the event as graceful even by O'Connor's definition. The hired man, played by William Hickey, is a worn-down, penniless drunk who takes Shoats' money because he needs what he can get. When he speaks, he does so in a halting mumble, suggesting brain damage of some sort. When Hazel catches up to the man alone, however, he rams the impostor's car off the road, forces him to remove his preacher's clothes, and then runs the man over in quick succession. With only a minute or two of screentime, Hickey makes his character so sympathetic and ignorant that to see him murdered so brutally does not spark reminders of Christ's righteous purge but merely disgust. Huston commits to making Hazel into a Christ figure, but he gets the last laugh by portraying this turn as darker than anything in the man's previous character. After running him over, Motes gets out to insult the dying man, who begins to repent for his sins and even begs, "Jesus, help me" while looking right at Hazel, who is so consumed by hate that he leaves the man to die without another word. If Jesus must win, contrary to Huston's own wishes, then the director can at least make it a Pyrrhic victory.


Despite preaching for a new Jesus, Hazel had previously rejected replacements for Christ, going so far as to bash a mummified body Enoch stole to use as Motes' "mascot" against the wall and toss it out the window when Sabbath Lily brings it to him in swaddling clothes as if the Virgin Mary presenting her newborn son. Yet the sickening, chilling interlude with the impostor marks a change in Hazel that causes him to rapidly adjust to the role of the new Jesus he called for earlier. He actually blinds himself with lye, scaring off both Asa and Sabbath Lily by confronting them with true belief, returns to filling his shoes with rocks and screws and even wraps his torso in barbed wire. In a world where no one cares about Jesus, this upstart icon cannot even find someone who hates him enough to make him into a martyr, forcing him to do all the torture himself.

I realize that I have used all these words yet devoted none to Brad Dourif's performance. Dourif's presence alone challenges any preconceived notions of Huston's style. One of the embodiments of the old studio system, Huston would be one of the last people I would think to direct a film with Dourif in the lead. Dourif, who came to prominence as the stuttering, infantile yet intense Billy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is one of the symbols of the more daring edge of New Hollywood, an actor so dedicated to his craft that he actually went back to acting school after being nominated for an Oscar. Where contemporaries like Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper portrayed intense madness on the screen with a subtle layer of drug-addled mania, Dourif communicated pure insanity, an instability that seemed to come directly from him (speaking of which, how wonderful was it to see Werner Herzog play Dourif against his clearest mainstream descendant, Nicolas Cage, in Bad Lieutenant?). Dourif admits that he was not Huston's first choice and only got the part because Tommy Lee Jones was not free, but he brings his frightful dedication fully to bear: his icy blue eyes can barely hold back decades of Hazel's pent-up rage and pain, his frame shaking just as violently as his terrified childhood self. Every inch of him bristles as if connected to a live wire, and the venom in his voice seeps into your pores. My only previous connection of Huston to the New Hollywood movement was his performance in Chinatown, but his appearance was itself a reference and -- when examined in the context of his character in the film -- a commentary on Old Hollywood style and the darker implications of Hays Code films now brought out for all to see.

Reportedly, he and Dourif clashed at several points during the production, from the actor's presumptuous pursuit of the lead role to his protests over a scene Huston loved that Dourif felt killed the flow (the scene was later cut). Yet they find a beautiful, unexpected harmony together, Huston's workmanlike direction gaining an edge from capturing Dourif's fury even as it places us just far enough from Hazel's thoughts to allow us to be repulsed by him just as Huston and O'Connor want us to be.


"Jesus is a fact!" screamed Asa to Hazel in his first encounter, a loopy, stereotypically fundamentalist proclamation of hollow piety, yet one O'Connor agrees with on some level. Even at the beginning, she sows the seeds for Motes' transformation, eying a woman on the train who looks too intently at the price tag on his suit and asking her, "I bet you think you've been redeemed, don't you?" like the vengeful Christ who haunts Hazel's thoughts. By the end of the film, Huston has built upon such moments to turn Hazel into a Jesus who seems to only bring pain to others, not deliver them from it, though even that is giving him too much credit. Only the spinster landlady takes any interest in the mutilated Hazel, and her romantic feelings for him are tinged by budding religious need; when she declares her love for the Stoic, disinterested man, she phrases her statement as if preparing for a baptism, saying, "I've got a place in my heart for you." Motes balks at the suggestion and leaves without a word, but his wounds get the best of him and he dies in a ditch a few days later. Police cart him back to the landlady, believing him unconscious and demanding that he pay her owed rent, and the film closes with her entreating Hazel once more, only for him to lie on the bed sprawled and immobile as she tries to stir him.

O'Connor plays this moment as Hazel's relief from torment, a reunion with the God he hated so long -- O'Connor always forced her characters to die to know full salvation, death of course being a necessity for the afterlife. Huston, however, hints that this may be the start of the new religion, with one person, the one person who loved him, no less, taking up the charge for Hazel's Church Without Christ and using him as the martyr necessary to win converts. Naturally, she will speak glowingly of her idealized vision of Hazel, and if word can take root, Hazel may morph through the generations into a vision of purity to guide humanity. Ergo, Huston darkly and ingeniously postulates that this is the story of Jesus himself. No other figure suffered so terribly to fulfill the strict wishes of his patriarch, and who's to say that Christ wasn't a madman who gripped passers-by and screamed against the current state of spiritual being, heeded by only a small group before his death. It took centuries for word-of-mouth to make Christianity such a force that persecution could not hold them back, and the ending of Huston's Wise Blood turns the entire story on its head: what if Hazel didn't refashion himself into a Christ figure so much as Jesus once grew out of a man like Hazel? Auteur or no, find me another man in his seventies who would make such a film for his 33rd feature.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans

The release of every new Nicolas Cage feature brings with it a question: will we be getting the Nicolas Cage of actorly fearlessness -- the one who will go to any lengths for his character in films like Adaptation, Leaving Las Vegas and Bringing Out the Dead -- or the Nicolas Cage who looked at the paycheck and not the script, who is just as fearless but in all the wrong ways. You know, the Cage who will thunder such choice lines as "HOW'D IT GET BURRRRRNNNED?!" like William Shatner's mentally deficient, incestuous lovechild.

With Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans, Werner Herzog's kind-of, sort-of, not-even-remotely remake/sequel of Abel Ferrara's 1992 opus, the answer to that question is "yes." Cage's Terrence McDonagh roams the streets of a post-Katrina New Orleans looking for any means to distract him from the back pain he suffered in an uncharacteristic display of heroism, as much a junkie as the suspects he questions in the case of murdered African immigrants. Were this anyone else's movie -- and I promise that it couldn't possibly be -- Terrence might be a symbol of the U.S. government's appalling reaction to the hurricane, his stance as the lawman who ignores the law cruising uncomfortably close to the hysterical reactions to looting and the Bush administration's despicable inaction. And perhaps, in some way, it is; in response to my recent review of Aguirre and my brief discussion of the warped colonial microcosm Herzog created, Ed Howard (author of the estimable blog Only the Cinema) remarked that political readings of Herzog's work are too narrow, that the auteur cares for the endless contradictions and mysteries of humanity itself and not the petty ways in which it is expressed. He's absolutely right, but I don't think we should be so quick to dismiss potential political explorations within his corpus; one should not use them as a bedrock for criticism of the man, but politics are one way that the ideas and dreams of mankind are exhibited.

However, if I were to truly delve into Herzog's mind -- a terrifying prospect, but something a viewer must do with all of his films as they are so inexorably tied to his skewed perspective -- I would indeed expand the scope: Cage, clearly kneeling at the altar of Herzog's insane muse Klaus Kinski, is so unhinged that he becomes a force of nature. When those levees broke, water wasn't the only thing they unleashed upon New Orleans. McDonagh, who sees hallucinations of dancing souls and exerting an inexplicable control over those with whom he crosses paths. Katrina, it seems, set loose the white devil, master and slave to powders that have replaced old voodoo concoctions.

The thought of Werner Herzog directing a police procedural likely doesn't leap out at the average filmgoer as much as Nicolas Cage in a role that promises utmost hyperbole, which is a shame. If more people knew about the director, the prospect of him even nominally approaching such a plot-heavy genre as "crime drama" is funnier than anything Cage has ever done. Indeed, Bad Lieutenant takes so many left turns that the fleeting moments where it actually plays the genre straight are as uproarious as the rest of the film, which departs not only from any identifiable genre trappings but reality itself.

This is a film where a police detective rips out an elderly woman's oxygen hose to get information out of her caregiver. This is a film that cuts from a moment of rivalry between police officers to a shot of an alligator nearby. This is a film where that isn't the only cutaway to a reptile: it opens on a shot of a snake slithering through the fetid waters flowing in the city streets and features an extended sequence between Terrence and a pair of imaginary iguanas (singing iguanas, no less, and not of the computer-animated variety). "Who but Cage could regard an iguana sideways in a look of suspicion and disquiet?" asked Roger Ebert in his review of the film; "You need to keep an eye on an iguana. The bastards are always up to something." With all respect, Roger, I think the iguanas might be the ones casting glances at him.

Herzog has crafted here his finest and most inexplicable comedy since his great Stroszek, though even the broad brushstroke of comedy might still be to restrictive a label for this film. Herzog has directed numerous operas in his career, primarily the works of Richard Wagner (he even directed Lohengrin one year at Bayreuth, king of the opera/classical music festivals), and Bad Lieutenant is certainly outlandish enough for the stage. Unlike the serious-minded opera of Wagner, Bad Lieutenant recalls the comedic German opera of the singspiel, particularly semi-dramatic works like Beethoven's Fidelio (which also features a rescue in a cell and, even more incidentally, was once directed by Herzog).

As is nearly always the case with Herzog's films (at least on the first go), I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, yet I'm in love with its delirium. Herzog packed his cast with performers who are no strangers to going above and beyond the call of duty -- Jennifer Coolidge, Brad Dourif, Val Kilmer(!) -- yet they seem to recognize that any attempts to approach Cage's mania would simply melt the film stock and give reserved but no less entertaining performances. Cage's, though, is his finest in years, his best since Lord of War if not his otherworldly turn in Adaptation: he is a star going nova, yet he also has his moments of lucidity and deduction, and we can see that he can be a good cop -- in a memorable early scene and the only one to completely work as a straight piece of cop drama, he displays a keen insight into interrogating suspects without forcing guns to their heads. The original Bad Lieutenant was no standard police drama, what with its deliberately suffocating Catholic guilt fogging over the narrative, and Herzog manages to sidestep the genre without using any of Ferrara's themes or techniques; as he did with his other, wonderful recent foray into American cinema, Rescue Dawn, Herzog displays just enough respect (or tolerance) for a rigid genre to dabble in it for a few moments before subverting everything in his path, not out of discontent and irascibility but through the simple nature of his being. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans is a portrait of its titular city via its rampaging demon, giving its darkly humorous, endlessly quotable script an undercurrent of sadness: for once, the man who could dominate the world around him is not the hero of Herzog's focus but a tragic victim.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Though Peter Jackson shot the three Lord of the Rings films simultaneously, the technical progress from Fellowship to The Two Towers is immediately evident: the CGI is more detailed even as it expands to absurd dimensions, Jackson's more direct camerawork no longer clashes so garishly with the poetry of the location shooting and set design, which looks even better than it did in the previous film. Indeed, for better or worse, the massive expansion of scope in The Two Towers paved the way for the swords and sandals epic that became a brief fad in the middle of the decade after Gladiator set up the foundation. (The genre eventually fizzled out after most of its entries lost money, with audiences just smart enough to realize they were paying money simply to see LOTR again; still, while we had to suffer mediocrities like Kingdom of Heaven, we also got some fantastic works like... the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven).

The enlarged scope of the action, however, almost entirely eliminates the personal feel of its predecessor. Bifurcated into separate plots involving Sam and Frodo's suicide mission to Mordor and the remaining Fellowship members' fight against corrupt wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee), the story must leap great distances to follow its characters. Indeed, compared to the endless close-ups of Fellowship, Two Towers tends to track movement through extreme long shots in bird's-eye views, dwarfing characters against the beautiful New Zealand, and where I complained last time that Jackson kept cutting to close-ups when I wanted to see more of the world around the characters, these long shots often prevent an emotional connection with the characters. If it seems at this point that I simply cannot be pleased, know that I am wondering that myself.

Yet one must acknowledge that, compared to the first film, Two Towers zips along with vigor: Fellowship spent a notable chunk of time (particularly in the extended cut) simply roaming the idyllic Shire, giving some time to characters who have no impact on the rest of the story. Following an eight-minute montage of Middle-Earth's past and the history of the One Ring, Jackson never cut away from the Shire until the 32-minute mark and only moved away to other locations once or twice for the rest of the first hour. Within the first 32 minutes of The Two Towers: we see a longer version of the fight between Gandalf and the Balrog that continues after he falls; Frodo and Sam making their way to Mordor, meeting, capturing and "taming" Sméagol/Gollum (Andy Serkis); Saruman's Uruk-hai and Orcs march captured Hobbits Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan) until the reach the edges of Fangorn forest and the two factions begin killing each other before Men arrive to slay the stragglers; another contingent of evil creatures terrorizes and burns the homes of the people of Rohan; Saruman converts his home, Isengard, from a lush garden into an industrial nightmare to breed (literally) an army; Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn chase after the Uruk-hai who captured Merry and Pippin; Théoden, King of Rohan, is so poisoned by the spell of Saruman that he banishes his brave and loyal nephew Éomer and does not even acknowledge the death of his own son; then, finally, the three Fellowship members chasing the Uruk-hai stumble upon Éomer and other banished soldiers.

Phew. To Jackson's credit, he never flags when jumping across different perspectives and huge physical distances, but here he's missed the point that he understood with Fellowship: The Lord of the Rings isn't about the plot -- which is ultimately no more complicated than a journey from point A to B -- but the finely detailed minutiae that turned the simple act of a long-as-hell hike into one of the great works of 20th century literature. Jackson barrels ahead in such an action-oriented mindset that character and atmosphere falls to the wayside:Legolas and Gimli become nothing more than comic relief, more so even than Merry and Pippin: Tolkien wrote the characters to comment upon intolerance and xenophobia, but they bond here only through light insults and fascistic displays of murderous violence (this existed in the book, but it was never a true competition between the two). Compare their tedious boasting to the bit in the extended cut of Fellowship in which Gimli is so overwhelmed by Lady Galadriel's beauty that he can ask her for nothing but a single hair from her head, and the deference he feels for Elves afterward. Éowyn (Miranda Otto) and Éomer have nothing to except pine for Aragorn and be surly, respectively.

The most troubling development is the massive rewrite of Faramir's story: in the book, Faramir (David Wenham) and his Gondorian Rangers stumble across Frodo, Sam and Sméagol, he questions Frodo and Sam about the Ring and his slain brother Boromir and then releases them, aware of the danger of the Ring and unwilling to risk its corruption to wield its power. Jackson and co. completely rewrote the character into someone scarcely different from his brother: "Filmamir" manhandles the Hobbits and tacitly condones the beating of Gollum, even choking the creature twice in rapid succession in their last moments together. Faramir does not release the Hobbits at first but drags them to the besieged city of Osgiliath, sure that the Ring will somehow help Gondor's fortunes. By the time he does display the nobility and wisdom that separated him from his brother, it's impossible to distinguish between the two. A flashback (deleted in the theatrical cut but available in the longer edition) helps explain the Faramir's motives for attempting to seize the Ring, but it's simply not enough justification. Jackson added such a massive deviation because he moved the book's climax to the third film (rightly so, to correspond with the actual chronology of events), but he ruins a great character in the process, undercutting Faramir's moral fortitude to stress the necessity of Aragorn's return to the throne. Jackson would have served himself better by simply making the more epic Helm's Deep sequence the full climax and using the time allotted by cutting this stuff out by fleshing out the world to the degree he did in Fellowship.

Of course, when Jackson deigns to let us wander a bit, Two Towers has the same epic poetry that its predecessor contained in greater abundance: Rohan is a nondescript, wide-open plain -- the Kansas of Middle Earth -- but Helm's Deep is a masterpiece of miniature construction. A stone behemoth carved from the mountain it's connected to, Helm's Deep promises a hell of a fight before anything happens; for my money, the battle sequence that takes place here trumps the larger one in Return of the King. It lacks some of the dodgy CGI of the later sequence, and it's epic without brushing up against the border of absurdity (oh, that Oliphaunt riding thing continues to grate, doesn't it?). For that matter, Isengard is also a terrific creation, nicely juxtaposing the furnaces of industrialism with the hellfire of Mordor. The real treat of the film, though, is simply following Sam and Frodo on their quest to Mordor: the Dead Marshes, Emyn Muil, the Black Gate of Mordor. All of them look fantastic and suitably unsettling and unwelcoming, offering the only true ambiance of the film.

And, behold, great character development exists, in the form of a completely animated character. Looking back, if Two Towers' animated battle sequences paved the way for mass epics, then Gollum revealed that heavy animation in live-action films could carry emotional weight. He's a masterpiece, owing both to the incredible work by Weta Digital (only occasionally can you spot moments where the technology used on him has dated) and the exceptional, award-worthy performance by Andy Serkis. He captures the character(s) perfectly, imbuing the split personalities of Sméagol and Gollum with such depth and distinctive originality that one can always tell "who" is speaking at any moment -- to find a similarly bravura performance, one would have to turn to Nicolas Cage's performance as the twin Kaufman brothers in Adaptation. He could have been nothing more than a set piece, a bit of technology to be ogled at but never explored (like, say, the magnificently rendered creatures of Avatar), but Serkis and the writers give him pathos and empathetic qualities. Nothing else in the rest of the trilogy is as brilliant as the shot/reverse shot conversation between Sméagol and himself: initially funny, it morphs into a heartbreaking portrait of a wretched creature tortured by a curse that destroyed far stronger people.

So, for all of The Two Towers' flaws, it's still incredibly entertaining, indeed probably the most viscerally and immediately enjoyable of the three. For that reason, it has its ardent defenders, but I can't help but view it as the odd one out; the pendulum simply swung too far from "overly intimate" to "epic but impersonal." Furthermore, where the additions in the extended cut of Fellowship let us languish a bit more in this beautiful world, the deleted scenes of Two Towers interrupt its narrative momentum, breaking up its breezy pace with moments of limp comic relief -- yes, I suppose that Éowyn's lack of cooking skills reflects upon her predisposition to fighting and not "woman's work," but the way this is used to signify her masculine outlook on life is just sexist. Besides, they don't make a convincing case for her warrior spirit (save for a few tough-talking lines here and there) when she spends nearly all of her screen time staring atAragorn with longing eyes. Yet even if The Two Towers is the only one of the trilogy to be hampered by its additional scenes, it has enough breathtaking action scenes and moments of quieter beauty to make the task of sitting through its hefty length an easy one.