“What is the matter?”, a woman mysteriously acquires a pair of healing hands after a close brush with death and a glimpse of the afterlife, and she is more than gladly to use her newfound gift to cure those physically afflicted, still, her completely altruistic deeds cannot shun being lambasted and questioned by those God-fearing, shit-kicking bigots, what the heck?
In Daniel Petrie’s RESURRECTION, Ellen Burstyn plays Edna Mae, the bona-fide miracle worker, who has to take the shaft of being resistant to drag the Deity into her newfound vocation. Earning her fourth Oscar nomination, Burstyn steely puts her foot down in the sense that her Edna Mae is anything but a damsel-in-distress or patsy. After losing her husband Joe (DeMunn) in the opening car crash, Edna Mae doesn’t linger too long in remorse (the automobile is her birthday gift to Joe) or grief (not much tea and sympathy is thrown to her either), and when her first impulse to perform a styptic miracle hits, she acts immediately (though the whole act looks clumsily staged), to say nothing of involving herself in a sexual relationship with Cal (Shepard), a man much younger than her, and whose religious fundamentalism will soon catch up with their burgeoning romance.
Truth to be told, as sagacious as its messages are, RESURRECTION still feels antiquated for its gender antipathy/sympathy dichotomy appertaining to Edna Mae, it is quite exasperating to see her viciously accused by her own emotionally distant father (Blossom), and chided by Cal who just cannot get over his macho small-mindedness and perversely clams up when she entreats, though Shepard effectively takes the edge off Cal’s inanity with his distinctive inscrutability and panache. at least, audience can relate to what Edna Mae sees in him at the first place. Among the petticoat group, Madeleine Sherwood has an arresting cameo as one of the recovered patients, and the octogenarian Eva Le Gallienne pours her heart and soul into Granny Pearl, uttering the most affecting lines in her farewell with her beloved granddaughter, and the legendary, queer stage generalist (the film is only her third and final movie credit) meritoriously reaps an Oscar nomination.
As the money shot, the tunnel-end, cobalt blue-tinted, starburst special effect of the so-called afterlife fails to underlie an otherworldliness with distinction. Petrie’s narrative and Carlino’s script often suffer from longueurs that go nowhere (like the scientific research, not even a tentative explanation is propounded, but there is a real two-headed snake!) or feel repetitive (no tension can be squeezed out among sundry healing processes), moreover, the general tone is more workmanlike than a prestigious drama of its time, and that’s all she wrote.
referential entries: Petrie’s A RAISIN IN THE SUN (1961, 8.4/10); Martin Scorsese’s ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974, 7.8/10).
