What fatal conjunction of the stars could account
for the fact that two films dealing with a relationship between a boy and a much
older man opened in the same week? But the one, L.I.E., might be termed a
"song of experience," detailing a teenager's encounter with a
pedophile, while Hearts in Atlantis, adapted by William Goldman from
a pair of stories by Stephen King and directed by Scott Hicks, is a somewhat strained paean to the
vanished days of the protagonist's youth, told in a long flashback that occupies
most of the running time of the picture. Yet where L.I.E. plays around not too
successfully with some explosively scabrous material, in Hearts in Atlantis only
dirty-minded adults and some equally dirty-minded juvenile hoodlums think ill of
the friendship between the eleven year old Bobby Garfield (Anton Yelchin) and
the aging Ted Brautigan (Anthony Hopkins).
I had premonitions of disaster going to see a
movie with as lugubrious a title as Hearts in
Atlantis. Fortunately, they turned
out to be largely unfounded. At the beginning of Hearts of Atlantis, the adult
Bobby (David Morse) returns to his former home in a small town for a funeral and
recalls events that had taken place in 1960, when his widowed mother took
in the amiable but mysterious Ted as a boarder. After the two become friends,
the clairvoyant Ted warns Bobby to be on the lookout for some sinister men who
are pursuing him. Ultimately, however, it is Bobby's own mother, who has been
suspicious of Ted's interest in her son from the beginning, that betrays the man
to his enemies in order break up the relationship between the boy and the older
man.
Hearts in Atlantis made me think of a mildly
supernaturalized version of Truman Capote's novel Other Voices, Other Rooms.
Stephen King fans may be disappointed, but Goldman has wisely chosen to downplay
the whole question of Ted's psychic powers in favor of more dramatically
promising material. More than anything else, the film harks back to what was
once a quite popular subject in post-World War II American novels, plays, and
motion pictures, the story of a sensitive youth, male or female, coming of age
in a hostile environment. Probably the most famous, as well as most artistically
successful, representative of the genre is Carson McCullers' drama Member of the
Wedding, but it also crops up in both of James Dean's two most famous roles,
in Elia
Kazan's East of Eden and in Nicholas Ray's Rebel without a Cause, and lives on in
Pat Conroy's novel The Great Santini, which supplied the material for a highly
successful movie directed by Lewis John Carlino and starring Robert Duvall.
All of these works in whatever media are lineal
descendents of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's great novel The Sorrows of Young
Werther (1774),
whose publication marked one of the truly revolutionary events in the history of
European literature. But by the time James Dean came along, the conventions of the genre
were beginning to look pretty threadbare. The real
driving force behind the rise of the youth genre in the 1950s and since has been
the ever-expanding teenage market, not the justifiable despair of adolescents
about the way things are. Set in the United States today, where at
some schools students pack guns and know all about the mechanics of sexual
intercourse before entering puberty, the sufferings of Werther or of the lovers
in Frank Wedekind's Spring's Awakening, would seem almost farcical.
It is thus hardly surprising that Hearts in
Atlantis moves its story back into a less problematic era. Nevertheless, I find the whole idea of 1950s America as a locus
of innocence highly specious for a couple of reasons. First of all, I'm getting
tired of seeing pop artifacts from the period being treated with the same
reverence usually accorded great works of art from the High Renaissance.
Secondly, having lived through those years--I turned eleven in 1954--I can
attest that it was no age of innocence. The omnipresent threat of nuclear
destruction, the tacit suppression of dissent, the stultifying conformity of the
Eisenhower regime--these were the salient features of the 1950s, whose
repressive atmosphere was far more accurately captured by the animated feature The Iron
Giant (1999) than by this movie. Nor are matters helped by Hicks's
predilection for smothering his material under a thick
impasto of spurious visual lyricism laid on with help of the cinematographer, the
late Piotr Sobocinski. At its worst, Hearts
in Atlantis resembles a kitschy brochure for a
travel agency featuring trips into the past--"Revisit the Scenes of Your
Lost Youth Now!"
Stephen King often associates sexuality with violence,
but Hearts in Atlantis makes a graphic equation of the two by crosscutting
between shots of Bobby's mother being raped by her boss in a hotel room with
ones of Carol being beaten by a villainous youth from a Catholic school who has
previously tried to harass her and ridiculed Bobby as a fairy. More
sophisticated films in this genre, like Joseph Losey's The Go-Between, usually
present the loss of innocence as compensated, if unequally, by a tragic yet
inevitable gain in
knowledge--"We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains
behind," in the words of William Wordsworth's great "Ode: Intimations
of Immortality". Yet by
making this equation, Hearts in Atlantis depicts adult sexual desire not just as
a loss of innocence, but as a descent into animality.
What awaits Bobby as he moves into puberty would
seem to resemble the fate of Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man (1941). The only antithesis
to the basically depraved behavior of most adolescent/adult males in the film is
represented by Ted, who is not only celibate but practically sexless. True, he
makes jokes about kissing girls with Bobby, but he comes across mainly as a male
old maid. At the end, Bobby and his mother, now reconciled, move to Boston, and
he goes on to a prosperous career as a photographer. Nevertheless, the film's real
center of gravity lies in the past, and Bobby's memories of his pre-pubescent
days of splendor in the grass.
In spite of its pretensions,
Hearts of Atlantis
is a lightweight movie, but not a bad one. The release of the film was, needless
to say, only fortuitous, but given the longing for affirmation in the country at
this moment, I think the picture is headed to be a big hit. Nor will the
small-town setting and the shrewd way the movie plays the nostalgia card hurt
its chances of success at the box office. Hearts of Atlantis is a far better
picture than the wildly overrated The Sixth Sense, and it deserves to do at
least as well as that overdone turkey did. Note 12/13/01: So much for my ability
to forecast box office grosses. Hearts in Atlantis sank quickly from view
not long after its initial sortie, although it may win Hopkin an Oscar®
nomination for his performance.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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