To pass the time away on long car trips, my husband and I like to go to Cracker Barrel to rent books-on-tape. Lasting anywhere from 3 to 6 hours, these tapes often mean the difference between stopping early because we're too sleepy to drive on, or staying awake just to get through a "page-turner".
I actually have a Point here: on our last long car trip, I saw the book-on-tape on which this movie is based, but didn't get it because I knew I'd be reviewing the movie soon. Now I wish I had. I might've been less sleepy in the car than I was in the theater.
THE STORY (WARNING: **spoilers contained below**)
Where The Heart Is is a lonnnng movie, filled to the brim with Colorful Southern Characters:
- Novalee Nation (Natalie Portman), pregnant at 17-years-old, and highly superstitious about the number "five" after having been abandoned at an early age by her mother (Sally Field in a cameo), leaves Tennessee headed for California with her musician boyfriend...
- ...Willy Jack Pickens (Dylan Bruno), who abandons her in an Oklahoma Wal-mart parking lot where she lives there after-hours for a time until she goes into labor and is rescued by...
- ...Forney (James Frain), a hyper librarian who develops the hots for Novalee, who is treated in the hospital by...
- ...Nurse Lexie Coop (Ashley Judd), a Free Spirit who teaches Novalee about Men - and Life - along with...
- ...Local Wal-mart photographer Moses Whitecotton (Keith David), who teaches Novalee about Photography - and Life - and...
- ...Sister Husband (Stockard Channing) and her long-time "thing", Mr. Sprock (Richard Jones), a magnificently randy, but caring, couple who teach Novalee about Gardening - and Life.
Did I miss anything? Yikes. I did.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town...
- ...Novalee's no-good musician boyfriend Willy Jack winds up in the office of talent agent...
- ...Ruth Meyers (Joan Cusack), a hard-edged, no-nonsense Power Chick who teaches Willy Jack about the Music Business. And Life.
THE UPSHOT
It's unfortunate that Lexie, Ruth Meyers, and Sister Husband, never met. They were by far the most interesting characters in the movie.
I knew, of course, that Joan Cusack was made of funny stuff. One of the best comic actresses out there - even in serious roles (like in Arlington Road for example) - I can think of only a few flicks in which she costarred that she didn't shine in, even above the most cruddy of material. Stockard Channing, too, was a delight. It's been a long time since The Girl Most Likely To (a TV-movie, I think, back during the days when "TV-movie" wasn't automatically preceeded with "bad"), but Channing was as strong here as I'd remembered her all those years ago. I truly wish that Cusack's Ruth and Channing's Sister, had had a chance to play off each other. My, the sparks that could've flown...
More surprising to me, though, was Ashley Judd as Lexie Coop. Never really taking Lexie over the top, Judd played her character as comical, yet at the same time, sad. It took a grownup actress to make a woman who names her children after candy, not come off as pathetic; Judd definitely was up to the task.
If I were to only look at these characters, plus Sprock (and later, at Lexie's relationship with a man much different than she was used to being with), I might think that Heart was filled with only good bits.
So much for the good bits.
As Novalee, Natalie Portman couldn't have been more dull and lifeless. It appears that she transferred her one expressionless expression over from her role as Queen Esmerelda (or whatever she was called) in Star Bores I and pasted it onto this character. It's not so much that she was bad, more like she was outclassed by her elders. Hmmm...on second thought, maybe she was just bad.
But as flat as the female lead was, Novalee's supposed relationship with Forney was that much worse. Never, and I do mean never, did I come anywhere close to believing that pairing. James Frain may be a fair-to-middling actor, but he was severely miscast here. Looking more like Portman's father than a love interest, it gave me the creeps to watch them together. Not A Good Thing when they're in the middle of a (ugh) kiss.
Another wish-I'd-heard-the-book-first moment: any scene past the Wal-mart abandonment, where Willy Jack was involved. While excising Bruno's scenes would've meant losing the services of the delightful Cusack, I have to wonder what, besides more potential yuks, the Willie Jack character served in the book - because he certainly seemed to be just more flotsam and jetsam in the movie.
And here's where I think Heart tells most on itself: instead of being a study of the ways of a wacky bunch o' people, it makes fun of them, drawing caricatures, not lovingly filled-in paintings. While it's fun to laugh along for a little while, two hours is a lonnnnng time to try to stretch out a singularly humorous situation. And high drama, it just ain't, no sirree jim-bob.
THE "BLACK FACTOR" [ObDisclaimer: We Are Not A Monolith]
Let's try something a wee bit different here: call this one, the "Southern Factor".
I'm first-generation Yankee; my mother and father both hailed from Arkansas, and I'm assuming that past the point their ancestors were brought to the Good Ol' US of A in chains, the rest of my forbears were also of southern stock.
Yet, in all the time I've known these good southern folk, and many more like them, I've rarely run across the kinds of backasswards folks that seem to come out of every nook and cranny in Heart. Maybe trailer dwellers are a Special Kind Unto Themselves, I don't know. But about the only place I've seen the likes of Willy Jack, Cherry, or Clawhammer, to their full wacked-out backcountry extent, is in a Hollywood Talkie. Or the National Enquirer. Wait; I did meet a few back when I was in Deliverance Country Port Aransas, Texas. But that was the Twilight Zone, anyway. Let's not talk about it.
Will southern folk ever be portrayed as People Like You And Me? No, at least not as long as Hollywood thinks it can wring Yet Another cornpone yuk out of it.
BAMMER'S BOTTOM LINE
Bad grammar aside, "heart" is what this flick desperately needed.
WHERE THE HEART IS:
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