Well geeks here is a "Whole-ly" man's view of Portman's WHERE THE HEART IS that Father Geek was E-mailed today...
Where The Heart Is by The Bishop Don "Mack" Donald
The ads on TV and the trailers in the theaters might promise a wild romp through white trash heaven. They’ll promise tears and laughter, and they will guarantee strong acting and well defined characters. What 20th Century Fox will not tell you is that their new film WHERE THE HEART IS is a complete mess of a picture. The movie feels as though it was fashioned from at least 2500 hours of footage. Ranging from cutsey comedy to downright creepy drama, HEART leaps blindly from one episode to another without ever stopping to check if the pieces are fitting accordingly. There’s tasteful, if incomplete, cinematic adaptations of beloved books, and then there’s WHERE THE HEART IS. Based on the novel by Billie Letts, it sets a new standard in storytelling absurdity.
The opus begins as a slight white trash comedy in which our pregnant heroine Novelee Nation (the luminous Natalie Portman) is abandoned by her jerk of a boyfriend at a roadside Wal-Mart. Without any money or anybody to help, Novelee makes the noted discount chain her new home. She sleeps on the fake lawn, showers in the bathroom, and keeps a strict record of all the things she’s used so she can pay it all back when her luck changes. After being discovered and giving birth at the same time, Novelee moves to a small southern town to live with a new friend named Sister Husband (yeah, I’m not sure either), befriends the town librarian (James Frain) and - I guess - the perpetually pregnant town nurse (Ashley Judd, though the film is a bit short on the details when it comes to her character). Dropping the plot in favor of episodic mush, Novelee dispenses wisdom and bad judgment as the years pass and her life slowly finds meaning. In a parallel story, we watch as Novelee’s deadbeat boyfriend tries to rise to the top of the country charts with his hit single and good for nothing manager (Joan Cusack). Man, I wish I was making that last part up. WHERE THE HEART IS features exactly the kind of schizophrenic narrative that gives "story" a bad name.
I could think of many annoying things to mention about WHERE THE HEART IS, but the main irritation of the film is the poorly realized passages if time. I should more accurately label them "giant leaps of story." Every scene - and I mean EVERY scene - begins with one of the characters proclaiming about the scene that preceeded it as being action that happened months ago or years earlier. Huh? Scenes open with "That was six months ago, sugar." or "Has it been two years already?", and it happens with disarming regularity. Each time a new scene opens, we are in a new time frame. It’s awfully disorienting to one minute be watching Novelee’s infant daughter cry for her bottle, then a scene later be complaining about the first grade. HEART does this over and over to maddening effect. Obviously this was an attempt to condense Letts’s novel into a manageable movie, but it would take 9 directors 9 years subsisting on a strict diet of No Doz to keep HEART focused and mannered. Director Matt Williams, a former producer and writer from ROSEANNE, just isn’t enough.
It doesn’t help to have a 115 minute, safely PG-13 rated film tackling topics such as domestic abuse, betrayal, death and dying siblings, sexual abuse, attempted rape, deceitful mothers, and limb severing. Because of the ball and chain known as the PG-13, we get male genitalia referred as "man things" and rape reduced to "he put his thing there". HEART is obviously a story for adults, but Fox just wouldn’t allow the film to be executed properly would they? Nope, HEART is more watered down nonsense that might have worked under the more artistically free R rating.
As much as I am a fan of Natalie Portman, she’s the most miscast member of this troupe. As the meek white trash girl with a killer smile and "asperratins", Portman is forced to swallow her fierce stare and natural instincts just so she can stay within her limits of the southern twang. She deserves better, as does Ashley Judd. Another wonderful performer with a kisser that could heat Quebec over holiday break, Judd falls victim to the film’s insistence that no character gets more than one motivation a piece. It’s numbing to watch how much talent is wasted on this hodgepodge of vignettes.
Why the need to force an expansive book into the limits of cinema is beyond me. WHERE THE HEART IS is like David Lynch meets STEEL MAGNOLIAS, it’s that weird. While the attempt at a "sistahood" movie is nice, and something more complex than a film that ends at school dance is very welcome, HEART is simply a lousy example of how to do it. Instantly forgettable, but forever wasteful. Don’t believe the ads.
