Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003) Reviews

• A good look at Southern extremes

  johnsamo-12005-07-07

  Grew up in similar places, but its a bit skewed. Don't really think you can get the whole of the South by going to a prison, some roadside bars and some Pentecostal churches. Its basically rubbernecking anthropology, searching for and finding the extreme without bothering to mention that it is the extreme... Not every southerner is poor, or has to either be a holy-roller or a heathen. Southerners generally are more religious than the norm, but for every Pentecostal, you'll find a baptist, Methodist and a Church of Christ patron that isn't nearly as eclectic and thinks the Pentecostals are a little weird too. But I've never been all that bothered by the Southern stereotypes (they are sort of true) so beyond that, a real entertaining film.

• Great

  b-zondag2005-12-09

  As a 'stranger' to the American culture, I was really impressed by this docu-movie. It gives me a look in the American South. Of course one can not give a complete portrait of something. There always a need for some subjectivity. I understand there a million other sides of the American South. For example, if you make a movie about Holland, surely you'll see mills and klompen. This is not representative for modern-day Holland, but it's a part of our culture, our history. I think the same applies to this movie. Apart from this, the movie is intertwining music, art and storytelling. This is fantastic!

• A caution as to the accuracy of what the documentary portrays.

  derbyd402006-08-22

  To amend the other comment, it is not primarily Louisiana, but North/Central/East Florida up to North Georgia/South Carolina area. I lived 23 years in Gainesville, FL, my master's thesis required me to extensively examine Southern Appalachian culture, I know people who have had Harry Crews for a professor, I have read much southern literature, and I am familiar with the Cracker culture. I only state this to show I am more researched with the "true" South. It is a good and rather accurate documentary but biased in that it focuses on finding out the meaning of something. Thus the documentary is not an accurate portrayal of the entire South but of sub-cultures to the South. Another good look at more Eastern Florida is "Vernon, FL," showing a different sub-culture well. The other review comment's enough and is accurate but to note it is hard for any one documentary or film to capture what the South is considering how regional and place specific traditions, religions, and lifestyles are, so don't take the film as "truth" creating a stereotype. A lot of behavior examined in this documentary comes from, in my opinion, boredom, difficult financial conditions, and the heat and humidity. Not a rather atypical result of these either I might add. Anybody staying anytime in any of these places will soon experience emotions contributing to this behavior and cultural identity. Other than that, it is worth watching if you are at all interested in documentaries, aspects of southern culture, or are just interested in people.

• a beautiful somewhat disturbing look at the deep south

  vincent-272005-04-02

  I saw this movie late at night myself as well and it's a mesmerizing film. I am from Canada, and the world portrayed in this film seems like from a far away distant country. Substitute Christianity for Islam or Hinduism or whatever crazy religion you want and there's not much difference, extremely poor, uneducated emotional people being whipped into a frenzy by charismatic preachers. It is fascinating but also disturbing. Jim White travels around describing this strange surreal world of misfits and fringe elements of an unforgiving society. But he looks at them with pity and sympathy, and it made me have a different view on these people. They live extremely hard lives in a land of obscene riches, if that isn't enough to drive anybody to the church, I don't know what is. Everything is black and white as one interviewed inmate describes "you're either an outlaw our your in the church", you're either going to hell, burning forever or you will be saved and go to heaven. They go to church, twirl around, speak in tongues and basically act completely crazy and if this were done anywhere else, they would be locked up, but in the church it's okay, which makes it kind of cool. It's kind of a enclosed crazy house where go absolutely bonkers and then (presumably) go back into the world and live a normal life. (Kind of reminds me of that episode of Star Trek with "Landrew", where the population goes completely looney at exactly noon for about 10 minutes every day). Of course there is the odd person, liked Jim describes, that goes absolutely nuts and stays that way. The saddest thing is these people and their leaders seem to be dictating a lot of decisions in the U.S. government right now, and after seeing this movie, the thought of that will send a shiver up your spine. Interspersed among these scenes is some really beautiful music, some by Jim White himself, it's adds a really nice touch to all the grimness that you witness throughout this film. There is beauty here, there is a rawness of emotion that can express itself in religious fervor or musical incarnations. It almost seems like the message is to leave the former for the latter. This is a nice companion piece to "The True Meaning of Pictures" a film by Shelby Lee Adams, a photographer who takes an unflinching look at the deep south. He goes even a little deeper than this film, interviewing the snake handlers and the strychnine drinkers, the REALLY wacked out elements of this society. Anyway, if this subject interests you, seek these two films out, they are honest, unexploitive, unflattering and not condescending looks that the deep south.

• A success, for its attempts

  oen-anderson2010-02-17

  I am sort of split both ways about this film. On the one hand, I agree with what a lot of folks have said about it--it certainly doesn't present a picture of the "whole" South, in any way, or even much of the South, at that. I was born in rural Virginia and grew up in Austin, TX., and I'm not much like most of the folks in this film, being from a large city with a culture very different from the corners of the Deep South this film was looking at. What's more, I'm currently finishing up my college education in Massachusetts, and when people up here ask me where I'm from and I tell them I'm from Texas, it does irk me when sometimes they give me weird looks and make comments like their whole picture of anything south of the Mason-Dixon line is just like this movie and it gives them the willies to have someone like that in the car with them or whatever (though even if it was, I don't see why that should--it's not like I or the folks in this film are gonna pull a pistol on them or something). That said, I think criticizing the film on those grounds misses its intent. It's clearly not a documentary in the same way that, say, a nature special is--the point is to focus on a very specific aspect of the South that the people involved in the film consider important and to capture it aesthetically, rather than make a "true-to-life" (whatever that means) depiction of the South as a whole. The film broadcasts that every second. Complaining about certain parts of it being "staged" or the characters in the film seeming hand-picked sounds silly to me--I mean, of course they are. This ain't a fly-on-the-wall film and it isn't trying to be; it's not trying to hoodwink anyone or pull the wool over the eyes of foreigners to sell records or whatever. I think it would be equally silly to view this movie and get the impression that it was trying to be an "objective" documentary, and if anyone sees this film and views it that way, I'm gonna say that's their fault for being thick and not the movie's for trying to "trick" them. I do think it's understandable to see this and have sort of a knee-jerk reaction lumping it in with all the other films and books and articles and advertisements and whatever that do portray the South in a very limited, stereotyped light and do so mainly to cash in on a false conception a lot of folks have and make a quick buck. They are certainly legion and irksome. However, not only do they try a lot harder to fool people, but they--like this film--are able to succeed based on the fact that what they are trying to portray does really exist, in a sense, just not in nearly as distilled a fashion. I've spent plenty of time in small towns, out in the woods, in the desert, the middle of nowhere, wherever, and though Texas is pretty different from Florida or Louisiana, the sort of folks and the kinds of happenings portrayed in this film are definitely around, and it can be a real joy to find people willing to spin a yarn or talk with you about religion or play music--or just shoot the breeze and relax or whatever. For some people--Jim White and a lot of the other musicians in the film, it seems, for instance--certain types of those sorts of experiences, in this case frequently the darkly or strikingly religious ones, are the heart of the South. They see them as the essence of the region, it's a distillation of what makes it important to them, and they want to capture it--in song, or film, or what have you. Doing that requires excluding a lot of other stuff about it that doesn't come as close to the core for them. Other people have very different ideas about what the essence of the South is, and that's fine, it makes sense; it's a huge and very multi-faceted area, but that doesn't make the views of those people illegitimate. In as much as this film is an attempt to capture that particular spirit, I think it's an emphatic success. It's sublime and haunting, the stories are great, and the music is wonderful. Does it show the whole, resounding South, in all its glory? Absolutely not--it has wrung a very specific type of dark beauty out of the region like a damp cloth. Woe betide anyone who views this film and thinks it's the total picture, for sure (although how any film could ever possibly hope to do that, I don't know--after all, just because it doesn't show your own experience of the South doesn't mean it misses the point, given that we've all acknowledged the South is vast), but it's hard to imagine that such a person would be able to tell the difference between the evening news and an action movie either. If you're better than that--and I think you are--you may enjoy this film.