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The devil of parenthood, quite the barbaric sermon. The Northern Iraq prologue gives a premonition of America's imperial tumults, an immemorial desert promptly braided with wintry Georgetown where a movie is being shot, "the Walt Disney version of the Ho Chi Minh story." The actress (Ellen Burstyn) is an independent nonbeliever, and therefore punished with the possession of her 12-year-old daughter (Linda Blair) by the foulest of spirits. A maelstrom of disease and poverty afflicts the pugilist-turned-Jesuit psychiatrist (Jason Miller), the oozing little girl tied in her bedroom is just what his crisis of faith needs. Reinforcements come from the craggy priest-archeologist, and there's the Bergman doubter himself, Max von Sydow, to lend his gravitas to the showdown with the succubus. "What an excellent day for an exorcism." William Peter Blatty has the solemn libretto, William Friedkin the barn-burning presentation. LeRoy's The Bad Seed, Baudelaire's monster-child, the case for the Inquisition. "A disorder of the nerves" is the diagnosis of Science, as ineffectual as the movie-buff police lieutenant (Lee J. Cobb) and with its own panoply of terrors. The demon makes itself at home inside the nymphet and greets the padre with a geyser of bile, a rare joke cuts from the vomitous jolt to the mother ironing the soiled shirt in the basement. Cinema's every cog and wheel marshaled for the assault, flashing lights and painted faces and churning obscenities, all part of that old-time religion. "I think the point is to make us despair." The redeemed corpse on the stone steps, the fiend not defeated but released back into the world. (Friedkin revisits the theme of transference in Cruising and Bug.) The real sequel is not Boorman's lustrous fantasy but Gibson's medievalism three decades later (The Passion of the Christ). Cinematography by Owen Roizman. With Kitty Winn, Jack MacGowran, William O'Malley, and the voice of Mercedes McCambridge.
--- Fernando F. Croce |