Set in mountainous Sevier County, Tennessee, in the 1950s, Child of God tells the story of Lester Ballard. Ballard is a dispossessed, violent man whom the narrator describes as "a child of God much like yourself perhaps." Ballard's life is a disastrous attempt to exist outside the social order. Successively deprived of parents and homes, and with few other ties, Ballard descends literally and figuratively to the level of a cave dweller, as he falls deeper into madness, crime and degradation.
The film differs from the novel regarding the ending. In the end of the novel Ballard dies in a mental hospital while in the film he escapes from the lynching mob through the tunnels and walks through the Tennessee fields.
In January 2012, it was announced that Scott Haze had signed on to play Lester Ballard, the film's protagonist. It was also announced that Tim Blake Nelson and Jim Parrack had signed on to play Sheriff Fate and Deputy Cotton, respectively. Production on the film began on January 31, 2012, in West Virginia.
Reception
Child of God has an approval rating of 42% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 50 reviews, and an average rating of 4.9/10. The website's critical consensus states: "An obviously reverent adaptation that fails to make a case for the source material being turned into a movie, Child of God finds director James Franco outmatched by Cormac McCarthy's novel."[6]Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 50 out of 100, based on 17 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[7]
