Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
The label synonymous with "As Seen on TV" goes after indie rock. Oh, sweet, delicious irony.
By Joey Sweeney
[04/28/00]

Movie Review
"Set Me Free"
A 13-year-old girl falls in love with a glamorous fictional prostitute in this elegiac coming-of-age story.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[04/28/00]

Column
The sound of Vietnam
How wizard Walter Murch created a soundtrack of horror for Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now."
By Michael Sragow
[04/27/00]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
At 18, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien had hits, connections and a major record deal. Nine years later, Del the Funky Homosapien has got domino rhymes and severely sore thumbs.
By Bill Werde
[04/27/00]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
Sometimes Jerry Garcia sounded bored playing with the Dead. But on the David Grisman-Tony Rice project "The Pizza Tapes," the old guitarist nearly caught fire.
By Seth Mnookin
[04/26/00]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

This "Where the Heart Is," adapted from an Oprah-endorsed bestseller by Billie Letts, starts off with two adorable female stars and a tone of folksy, trailer-park melodrama that puts it squarely in Fried Green Endearment country. But as its story becomes more and more ludicrous, its vision of American life becomes more and more canned and condescending -- a prefabricated blur of ambulances, tornadoes, tearful homilies and Life Lessons. Maybe the novel's good intentions felt more genuine, but what director Matt Williams and the longtime comedy screenwriting duo of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel ("EdTV," "A League of Their Own" and "Parenthood," just to name a few) give us here is strictly Middle America as seen on CNN.

Where the Heart Is Directed by Matt Williams Starring Natalie Portman, Ashley Judd, Stockard Channing, Joan Cusack and James Frain

When a boom mike bobbing in and out of the frame interrupted a nervous, tender scene between teenage single mom Novalee Nation (Natalie Portman) and her geeky librarian lover, Forney (James Frain), the preview audience around me began to howl in outrage. It was the sound of insult added to injury. After all, we had accepted that one Oklahoma town might have two working-class unmarried mothers who were beautiful gamines with perfect complexions. We had accepted the eccentric names: Lexie Coop, Moses Whitecotton, Thelma "Sister" Husband, Mr. Sprock. We had accepted the Christian kidnappers and the alcoholic sister in the attic and the character who becomes a country singing sensation and gets his legs cut off by a freight train. And then came this, clear evidence that even after all our sacrifice, the filmmakers still didn't give a damn about us.

I guess you can't call a movie "Where the Heart Is" unless you're preaching a sermon about Our Troubled Society. In Boorman's film, a rich, quirky father (Dabney Coleman) makes his kids go homeless to teach them a lesson, while in the 2000 version the literally barefoot-and-pregnant Novalee winds up living in a Wal-Mart for weeks after her boyfriend leaves her in the parking lot. There's something crudely brilliant about this premise, and Portman is at her best in these early scenes. With nothing but a shapeless tan sundress, a pair of flip-flops and $5.55 to her name (she's phobic about fives), Novalee retains the American faith in self-improvement. Alone at night in the spooky, hangarlike expanse of Wal-Mart, she reads Mothering magazine, works out with weights and keeps a scrupulous ledger of her appropriated food and supplies, marked: "I Owe Wal-Mart."

Frankly, the story of the girl who gives birth in Wal-Mart would have been plenty for a low-key, slightly off-kilter American fable in the vein of "The Straight Story." But just when it seems that Williams and his star have settled into a rhythm, "Where the Heart Is" makes the first of its daffy and ultimately fatal key changes. Novalee goes into labor on a dark and stormy night (in Aisle 5!), but Forney, the town's would-be intellectual, has apparently been stalking her and dives through the store's plate-glass window to deliver her baby. Novalee blacks out, perhaps to spare us the actual birth scene, and the next thing we know, she's a media celebrity as mother of the "Wal-Mart baby," with twinkly, wisecracking nurse Lexie (Ashley Judd) beside her hospital bed.

Now, I'm as charmed by Judd's unquenchable perk and spunk as the next fellow, but in terms of cuteness Lexie Coop is just a bridge too far. She has a propensity for getting knocked up by the wrong guy, and has wound up with a houseful of angelic children all named after snack foods (after Praline and Brownie, they became too horrifying to remember). Even when Lexie really hooks up with the wrong guy and gets severely beaten and brutalized, all it takes is some tearful late-night bonding with Novalee on the front porch to get her back on the path of living and loving. "We've all got meanness in us, but we've all got good in us too," Novalee pronounces. "And the good is the only thing that's worth a damn."

Maybe I should be grateful that this movie's Hallmark portrayal of single motherhood and nonmarital sex is likely to offend moralists of the hard right, but I'm not sure that's a good enough reason for such crappy writing and overall shoddy construction. This is Williams' first film as a director, and his experience producing sitcoms like "Roseanne" and "Home Improvement" shows. His individual scenes often seem fine, in a bright, punchy, cloudlessly superficial way, but he has no sense of how to make a feature-length narrative stick together. On several occasions, the story makes ungainly leaps across long stretches of time, leaving the characters -- who look completely unchanged -- to tell us that it has been two years since their last conversation or that Novalee's infant daughter is suddenly celebrating her fifth birthday.

Characters both kindly and evil pop in and out of the increasingly erratic story like that troublesome boom mike. "Sister" Husband (Stockard Channing), an earth mother with a Dodge pickup-cum-covered wagon, dispenses biblical verses and homespun humor, at least until the tornado hits. Moses Whitecotton (Keith David), the African-American photographer at Wal-Mart, occasionally shows up like a no-rent Obi-Wan to encourage Novalee's professional dreams. And for some reason, the movie occasionally skips out on Novalee to catch up with her no-account mullet-head ex, Willy Jack (Dylan Bruno), whose brief country-music career is stage-managed by a conniving Nashville agent (Joan Cusack, grievously miscast). Then there's Frain, providing his best Jeff Goldblum impression as Forney, the stammering geek who carries an obvious torch for Novalee.

By the time Novalee and Forney are finally enveloped in a soft-rock love theme, Willy Jack has been forced to beg for forgiveness and Lexie has pixied her way to snack-food baby No. 6, all my initial goodwill toward "Where the Heart Is" had been exhausted. It's a soft-focus cartoon in which Wal-Mart is the beneficent community center for small-town America (I hope the company paid through the nose for its starring role), clasping unmarried moms to its corporate breast, at least if they're gorgeous white chicks. Portman and Judd aren't responsible for the mendacious and finally repulsive sentimentality of "Where the Heart Is," but by the end their wholesome glow seemed contaminated by it, and that's a shame.
salon.com | April 28, 2000

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon