Taking Child of God seriously is as demanding a task as simply sitting through it. Consider the source: James Franco, career class clown and current aspiring auteur, at least according to his expanding tally of directorial ventures (most recently, As I Lay Dying and Interior. Leather Bar). Child of God sees Daniel Desario taking on the declarative prose of Cormac McCarthy by adapting the author’s third book, a nasty bit of work about primal humanity existing on the fringes of civilized society, into cinema. It’s so bleak, it makes No Country For Old Men look downright warm and fuzzy.
And that central grimness shows in every frame of Franco’s film, which deserves praise just for successfully transplanting McCarthy’s words from page to screen. McCarthy frequently spurns punctuation and fixates on degradation, desolation, and depression as topics of conversation throughout his bibliography; his singular literary style represents enough of a hurdle to the adaptive process without taking unrelenting cruelty into account as well. The entire idea of turning any McCarthy tome into a movie, particularly Child of God, seems like an exercise in masochism.
Franco, then, must have pretty deep reserves of tolerance for abuse, because his treatment of the original yarn remains more faithful to McCarthy’s intent than perhaps any other adaptation of his work to date. Child of God howls and seethes, exploring isolation’s effects on a human being with nauseating efficacy. Anybody foolish enough to pay the price of admission on the strength of its distant relation to No Country For Old Men and The Road will be duly rewarded with a film that’s absent of plot, more upsetting in its content, and constructed with haphazard craft. (Admittedly, comparing Franco to the Coens reeks of dirty pool.) Child of God is ugly by design, inside and out.
The film concerns itself with Lester Ballard (repeat Franco collaborator Scott Haze in slurred, impressive form), an unruly yet misunderstood man ejected from his family land by the long arm of the law and forced to live in wild seclusion. Perhaps unjustly, Ballard is treated with mistrust by his neighbors and by local authorities (notably Tim Blake Nelson’s stone faced sheriff) alike; he’s rough around the edges, but he doesn’t cut a criminal figure at the film’s onset. We’re therefore tempted, up to a point, to sympathize with his plight. He’s treated like an animal long before he starts acting like one.
But being displaced from his home and forced to lay roots in the middle of nowhere ensures that the unstable Ballard’s already fragile mind goes to seed. The existence he leads upon his eviction is pitiful; Ballard lives alone in a busted up cabin with only a dirty old mattress to rest his wary head and a handful of stuffed toys for company. But Franco doesn’t say much about Ballard’s circumstances, or even invite us to consider the moral implications of his transformation. Instead, he jettisons compassion in favor of taking his protagonist along increasingly monstrous paths. Before long, Ballard moves from sexual assault and public masturbation to straight-up murder with a side of necrophilia.
Franco invents nothing here; all the basics were born and raised within the confines of McCarthy’s punchy writing. But he has figured out how to tap into a vein of disturbing purity. He deviates little from the text, save for in how graphically he portrays Ballard’s transgressions. Child of God “gets” its source, and goes to great lengths to mire us in Ballard’s devolution. In part, this is representative of the schism separating film from literature – film leaves less to the imagination than writing, and less still when a director like Franco so brusquely thrusts upon his audience. The experience is decidedly unpleasant, all the way up to Ballard’s climactic, symbolic rebirth.
But it’s supposed to be unpleasant. What Child of God lacks in visual clarity, it more than makes up for in raw, unbridled energy. You won’t enjoy watching it, but films like this can’t really be evaluated in increments of enjoyment. If Franco had mined something resembling commentary out of Ballard’s fall from grace – or if the film had been shot worth a damn – he might have produced something to rival the best McCarthy adaptations. Instead, Child of God is just there, leering and grisly, and too devoted to maintaining McCarthy’s vision for Franco to bother with his own. The Coens and John Hillcoat used McCarthy’s novels as inroads and put their individual stamps on the material; Franco, meanwhile, contents himself with exploitation.
