‘Where the Heart Is’ Finds the Warm Fuzzies at Life’s Turns
“Where the Heart Is” plays like a feature-length version of one of those folksy commercials for Wal-Mart, where customers are greeted with big smiles and warm hugs. According to this shamelessly synthetic film, a Wal-Mart is not such a bad place in which to have your baby. And, if you do, you get a shot at celebrity and the offer of a job at the Wal-Mart of your choice.
Derived from the Billie Letts novel, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel’s slick, stereotypical screenplay finds Natalie Portman’s 17-year-old and very pregnant Novalee Nation and her no-good boyfriend, Willy Jack Pickens (Dylan Bruno), stopping off at a Wal-Mart in a small Oklahoma town. They’re driving from Tennessee to California in a ramshackle Plymouth. You guessed it: Novalee returns to the parking lot only to find that Willy Jack has ditched her, leaving behind just her Polaroid camera (which probably fell through the same hole in the car’s floor her shoes did).
The upshot is that once Novalee has her baby girl, whom she names Americus, she finds shelter with the kindly recovering alcoholic Sister Husband (Stockard Channing), who shares her trailer with a fellow AA traveler she calls Mr. Sprock (Richard Jones). (Asking the blessing at supper, Sister invariably asks God to forgive her and Mr. Sprock their daily fornication.)
At the Wal-Mart, where Novalee now works, she gets encouragement in her love of taking pictures from the store’s avuncular portrait photographer, Moses Whitecotten (Keith David). She strikes up a friendship with Ashley Judd’s Lexie Coop, a man-chasing single mother of five--she names them after snack foods, hence Brownie and Praline--who clearly is not too interested in avoiding pregnancy. Novalee is also befriended by Forney Hull (David Frain), the shy, gentle young man who has dropped out of college to take over the job of local librarian for his alcoholic sister.
Beneath a schmaltzy, cutesy-precious, nakedly heart-tugging surface lurks what could have been an affecting portrait of a nearly illiterate but bright teenager with no family or material resources who discovers how to make something of her life. For all her hard-earned accomplishments, however, Novalee feels she’s not good enough for the saintly Forney, who turns out to be the grandson of a New England governor. Portman is a lovely and gifted actress, and Frain is talented and personable too. We root for both of them.
It’s too bad their contributions, and those of many others, drown in a big glop of treacle. Throughout the film, we catch up needlessly with Willy Jack, who manages to latch on to Joan Cusack’s tough talent agent in his pursuit of stardom as a country singer. Naturally, he turns up in Novalee’s life at the climactic moment, but the picture, like Novalee, would have been better off losing him permanently. But, to his credit, Bruno’s portrayal of this dumb jerk is amusing and witty.
The film’s most honest note, however, is struck by Sally Field as Novalee’s shiftless mother, who ditched her years ago but turns up just long enough to cash in on the fleeting celebrity surrounding her granddaughter’s birth.
Pedro Almodovar would know how to have deft, affectionate fun with the soap operatics of this film’s coincidence-heavy plotting, and still make it come out as a salute to the strength and solidarity of women--that’s precisely what he did in his Oscar-winning “All About My Mother.”
But director Matt Williams--a veteran TV producer--takes a weighty, head-on approach filled with caricature, with its negative elements of condescension and artificiality. In comparison to “Where the Heart Is,” the Wal-Mart commercials seem like cinema verite.
* MPAA rating: PG-13, for intense thematic material, language and sexual content. Times guidelines: blunt sex talk, adult themes and situation.
‘Where the Heart Is’
Natalie Portman: Novalee Nation
Ashley Judd: Lexie Coop
Stockard Channing: Sister Husband
Joan Cusack: Ruth Meyers
A 20th Century Fox presentation of a Wind Dancer production. Producer-director Matt Williams. Producers Susan Cartsonis, David McFadzean, Patricia Whitcher. Executive producers Carmen Finestra, Rick Leed. Screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel; based on the novel by Billie Letts. Cinematographer Richard Greatrex. Editor Ian Crafford. Music Mason Daring. Costumes Melinda Eshelman. Production designer Paul Peters. Art director John Frick. Set decorator Amy Wells. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.
In general release.