DIRECTOR
Scott Hicks
SCREENWRITER
William Goldman
based
upon the novella
"Low Men in Yellow Coats" by
Stephen King
PRODUCER
Kerry Heysen
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Piotr Sobocinski
MUSIC
Mychael Danna
EDITOR
Pip Karmel
CAST
Anthony Hopkins (Ted Brautigan)
Anton Yelchin (Bobby Garfield)
Hope Davis (Liz Garfield)
Mika Boorem (Carol Gerber)
David Morse (Adult Bobby Garfield)
Alan Tudyk (Monte Man)
Tom Bower (Len Files)
Celia Weston (Alana Files)
Adam LeFevre (Don Biderman)
Will Rothhaar (Sully-John)
Timmy Reifsnyder (Harry Doolin)
Deirdre O'Connell (Mrs. Gerber)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 101m
U.S. release: September 28, 2001
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Scott
Hicks movies
reviewed on this site:
- Shine
|
Hearts in Atlantis is well-meaning sludge, based on slightly
worse well-meaning sludge that didn't have Anthony Hopkins going
for it. Stephen King's 1999 book of the same name was his glancing,
sidewise attempt at something serious and significant, and some
of the material in the book's five sections was powerful -- the
story "Hearts in Atlantis," for instance, with its
Vietnam-era college students playing the card game Hearts to
distract them from the looming draft. The movie has taken the
name of that story and the book, but it has nothing to do with
the story; it's based instead on the book's first section, "Low
Men in Yellow Coats," one of the sappiest and most self-derivative
things King has allowed into print.
Hopkins, at this point, knows
he doesn't have to do much. He lets his eyes twinkle with warmth
or wisdom, or he'll draw out a syllable to put a quiet stamp
of authority on whatever he says -- he's coasting here, really,
but it's generally entertaining coasting. As Ted Brautigan, a
mysterious man who befriends 11-year-old Bobby Garfield (Anton
Yelchin), Hopkins gets to wear a wreath of the uncanny while
projecting pure virtue. He also gets to deliver solemn platitudes
while Bobby and the camera hang on every word. He can't really
do anything with Ted except embody him amiably, though; screenwriter
William Goldman and director Scott Hicks (Shine)
don't give him anything fresh to work with.
Ted joins a long line of King
heroes given extraordinary powers (in this case, mind-reading)
only to find the world eager to destroy them or misuse their
gifts. A bit of Ted's power passes into Bobby, who uses it to
pick the Queen of Hearts at a carnival card game; that's supposed
to explain the "hearts" in the title, and Goldman gives
Ted a speech to cover the rest: "Sometimes when you're young,
you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living in
someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been ... then we grow
up and our hearts break into two." So Atlantis becomes the
lost kingdom of childhood innocence, rather than the '60s metaphor
King intended. Either way it's a bit florid.
Bobby is working on a flirtation
with his first great love, Carol (Mika Boorem), and steering
around the disapproval of his frazzled mom (Hope Davis, doing
the best she can with a character that barely makes sense). Ted
is being chased by "low men," who seek him for dark
purposes gradually revealed (none too adroitly -- in one of those
movie scenes where a newspaper headline pops up just in time
to slide the plot point into its slot). Goldman and Hicks frame
the story with the adult Bobby (David Morse), now married with
three kids, heading back to the old hometown for a friend's funeral.
He narrates, too, just like Richard Dreyfuss in Stand by Me,
except only at the beginning and end; you expect him to close
with "I never had any psychic old-man friends later on like
the one I had when I was 11. Jesus, did anyone?"
Hearts in Atlantis carries a dedication to its cinematographer,
Piotr Sobocinski, who died at 42 earlier this year; he shot a
few films for the acclaimed director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Sobocinski
drowns the film in golden sunlight, except for the adult-Bobby
scenes, which are drained and blue, as if adulthood were a vampire
sucking the life out of us all. If you're born with anything
special about you, life will beat it out of you with a baseball
bat or use it for dark designs. King and Goldman are both champion
sentimentalists of the past (Goldman tosses in an anecdote about
football legend Bronko Nagurski, a boyhood hero of Goldman's
invoked in many of his books, and Hopkins gets to reprise a little
magic trick he did in Magic, which Goldman wrote); put
them together and you have two guys who seem so depressed about
their lives today that they yearn for childhood. "Then we
grow up and our hearts break into two." Whose heart? Goldman's?
King's? A movie that says we might as well pack it in as soon
as we turn 18 is more bitter than bittersweet.
|