Year: 1973
Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow, Linda Blair, Lee J. Cobb, Kitty Winn, Jack MacGowran, Mercedes McCambridge
Director: William Friedkin
Nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Burstyn), Best Supporting Actor (Miller), Best Supporting Actress (Blair), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Sound Mixing
The Exorcist is one of those films that I don't really think I can talk about because there's no way I could say anything that hasn't already been said.
This indisputable classic, the first horror film to receive a Best Picture nomination, has been so quoted, memed and whatever else you can do with a movie that by now, even if you haven't seen it, you've seen it. You know that poor possessed Reagan MacNiell turns her head all the way around, that she declares to the priest that his mother sucks c**ks in Hell, and that she levitates while the priests shout "The power of Christ compels you!" You know that her bed rises into the air at some point, you know that young Reagan refers to the other presence as "Captain Howdy", you've seen the image of "Captain Howdy" with the wide eyes and sharp teeth, and you likely know that for probably the first half of the movie, everyone, the priest included, thinks Reagan just needs treatment for mental illness.
That being said, I was still surprised by many elements of this film the first time I watched it (not this time; this is one I've definitely seen before). For instance, I'd always believed that the priests wanted to come do an exorcism and that they had to talk Reagan's mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn) into it. Rather it's the opposite; after the doctors can find no reason whatsoever for Reagan's sudden change in behavior, nor can they explain some of the things they've seen, like her leaping off the bed several feet in the air from an inclined position, they finally suggest that if she really believes she's possessed, maybe an exorcism would convince her that the demon has left.
Desperate, Chris contacts young Father Damian Karras, a priest who's starting to lose his faith thanks to his ailing mother getting worse, doctors unable to prevent her from slipping away, despite her being a staunch Catholic with unshakable faith all her life. Karras, who also has his doctorate in psychiatry, also thinks Reagan is simply mentally ill, and lets Chris know that the Catholic church no longer performs exorcisms, as most of the conditions that used to warrant one have been revealed to be mental disorders. Even seeing Reagan in her state doesn't convince him. At one point he pulls out a bottle of tap water and declares that it's Holy water, which he begins splashing on Reagan's body. On cue, Reagan begins to thrash and twist as if being burned. This tells Karras that Reagan isn't possessed, and is merely acting like she thinks a possessed person would. That is, until Reagan's nanny Sharon (Kitty Winn) shows him that Reagan herself, still inside her body, is making scars on her skin spelling out the words "help me".
And this is another point; I'd always assumed that Max von Sydow, as Father Lankester Merrin, an experienced exorcist, was the principle male role in this film, and that it's he who spends most of the movie trying to exorcise young Reagan. His name is second in the credits and that iconic shot of him arriving at the MacNiell home (see the poster above) is instantly recognizable. In fact, he's essentially the title character, as he's the man with exorcism experience that the church calls in when Father Karras convinces them that Reagan really is possessed. The film actually does open with him in Iraq, on an archaeological dig where numerous images of a demon are unearthed. Then he's pretty well absent for a majority of the film, which Father Karras being the main contact with the church Chris has.
One common misconception a lot of people have is that this movie makes clear that Reagan is possessed by a Mesopotamian demon named Pazuzu. In fact, this movie never makes it entirely clear just what is possessing Reagan (at one point it claims to be the Devil himself, which Karras immediately dismisses) and the demon never names itself nor is named by the priests, at least not here. The novel might make it clear; I don't know. I haven't read it. But in the films, the name "Pazuzu" isn't spoken on screen until the second installment.
Much of the early parts of this movie frustrated me, as the doctors are so determined that Reagan is just mentally ill that they start grasping at straws. They insist that Reagan merely believes that she's possessed, and when Chris asks how she could leap off the bed like that, the doctor explains that her condition could be using her adrenal glands to give her what is essentially enhanced strength. My next questions would have been "Okay, and the unnatural bulging at her neck? And the multiple voices including male ones, sometimes several at once?" It bugs me when movie characters don't ask the obvious questions.
But yeah, I'm not going to waste much time going over this movie and asking if it deserved all its nominations, because of course it did, but I do have a couple of quibbles.
The first is that, at least as far as the films I've seen, this one really should have won Best Picture. I need to see The Sting, and once I do maybe I'll change my mind, but I know I'm not the only person to feel like the wrong movie won the top prize. At the very least, William Friedkin deserved another Best Director win, and I wonder if his loss stemmed mostly from the fact that he'd won already just two years prior for the film The French Connection. Also from the fact that it was a horror movie, a genre the Academy has historically had issues with.
Ellen Burstyn, who seems to show up in a number of films I've watched recently, pulls off the role of the increasingly worried, panicked, then frantic mother, but what really sells this to me is one scene that has nothing to do with motherhood. See, I didn't know this the first time I saw the movie but the character Chris MacNiell is actually an actress, and one early scene shows her acting on a set. When she's in character, she acts nothing like Chris MacNiell but still seems to be acting very naturally. It's actually harder than one thinks to play an actor acting, because there's a tendency to ham it up, but that's the moment when I was best able to buy her as a worried mother, because now she didn't seem to be acting in her scenes with Reagan and Father Karras.
Linda Blair received a Best Supporting Actress nomination, making her one of the youngest nominees ever, but I wonder how much of that was due to her incredible makeup job and Mercedes McCambridge as the voice of the demon within her. True, Blair had to emote through that makeup, and she really did speak during filming, with McCambridge's voice dubbed in later, and those really are her facial expressions, even if they're enhanced by the make-up. The scene I was most impressed with was the one in which she was hypnotized, as this was the main scene in which the creep factor was strongly present even before the make-up and dubbed voice. Am I saying she wasn't worthy of her nomination? I don't know. I don't think I'm really saying that. But I do wonder how much of an impact the make-up and voice had on her nomination, and she wasn't part of either one.
A bigger problem for me is what to do with Father Karras. Playwright and sometime actor Jason Miller plays Karras, in his film debut, and he's heavily present throughout the movie, with multiple scenes devoted to his character even before he's contacted by Chris. I can't confirm just how much screen time he had, but he definitely doesn't feel like a supporting player in this. I'd be shocked if he had much less screen time than Burstyn herself, and the movie is as much about him as it is about the MacNiells. I'll talk more about the concept of "category theft" when I do my write-up for this category, but honestly, I feel like if he'd been played by, say, Robert De Niro, he likely would have been campaigned for and nominated in the Best Actor category. Miller doesn't even get second billing. It just about has to be because it was his first film. You'd never know, though, because Miller fits this role so well you could believe they hired an actual priest (they did; all the members of Karras's parish are actual priests, but he isn't, and you'd never know). If there's a standout performance in this film, as far as I'm concerned it's his. This is why I think he should have been nominated for Best Actor; Max von Sydow did not receive a nomination for this iconic role and performance, but that's because he had to compete with his own co-star for the nod, and between the two, Miller's screen time and deep characterization, brought to life by his dour, realistic performance, made that no competition at all.
The last thing I want to talk about is that it's pretty rare for a film with makeup this good not to win an Oscar for it, but there's a handy explanation; the category did not exist at the time. That's a real shame because the makeup job they do on Linda Blair is phenomenal, and also iconic. But it's not just Reagan who impressed here; Max von Sydow was only 44 at the time, playing a character who's in his 70's at least. He's actually younger here than Stellan Skarsgård was when he played the young version of Father Merrin in the more recent Exorcist prequels. His makeup job is good enough that I never realized it until reading about it, and never did the math on von Sydow's age, assuming he must have been in his late 50's, early 60's at least, and in his 80's today....yeah, don't judge me, I just never really thought about it. Apparently he started losing work because people thought he was an old man. That's Oscar-quality makeup.
But it didn't win makeup, or any of its actual nominations, barring two; Adapted Screenplay and Sound Mixing. Both deserved, but come on, this movie, with its incredible impact on the film industry and horror as a genre, and only two awards? Really?
Next on the list is The Last Detail.
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