HEARTS IN ATLANTIS Rated PG-13, 98 minutes Directed by Scott Hicks WHEN, WHERE Now playing at the UA De Vargas
In its own way, `Hearts in Atlantis' is just as silly as `Zoolander.' It just isn't supposed to be. `Hearts' is one of those swelling-score-laden movies dripping with quality that practically have Oscar acceptance speeches written into the screenplay. Item: Anthony Hopkins, Sir Anthony Hopkins, an actor whose presence in a movie fairly screams Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Item: Scott Hicks, director of the wonderful `Shine' and the maligned `Snow Falling on Cedars', a man who knows how to polish a movie and showcase a character. Item, William Goldman, the celebrated screenwriter who earned his place in the cinema pantheon with `Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' in 1969 and the incomparable Hollywood study Adventures in the Screen Trade in '83. Item, Stephen King, the best-selling author who moves between horror and sensitivity with the élan of a Rudy Giuliani.
The story here comes from the sensitive side of King, the side that produced `The Shawshank Redemption', `The Green Mile', and the end-of-childhood melodrama `Stand By Me'. Childhood ends again in `Hearts of Atlantis', this time the childhood of 11-year-old Bobby Garfield (Anton Yelchin), who lives in a small Connecticut town with his self-absorbed mother, Liz (Hope Davis), a cold-blooded skinflint who gives him a library card for his birthday instead of the bike he wants. His father died when he was little, and left his mother with a lot of bills and a chip on her shoulder. `He never met an inside straight he didn't like,' she tells Bobby bitterly.
Things get cooking when elderly Mr. `call-me-Ted' Brautigan (Anthony Hopkins) moves in upstairs, and offers Bobby a buck a week to read the newspapers to him and keep an eye out for `low men' who may be closing in on him. Ted seems to have some sort of mind-reading gift (`People call it a gift….I've always found it more of a burden….'), and he goes off from time to time into glassy-eyed trances. When he's not doing that he encourages Bobby to read, and tells him stories; listening to Ted recount the comeback game of football legend Bronco Nagurski is like hearing a play-by-play from Alistair Cooke on Prozac.
The movie is framed, and perhaps you've encountered this device before, by the present day funeral of a boyhood friend, where middle-aged Bobby (David Morse) has his memory bank jimmied by a battered old baseball glove (which doesn't figure in the movie any more importantly than Atlantis does.) Back we go to 1959, or at least they say it's '59, although the songs on the available-in-stores soundtrack jump around disorientingly from '55 (`OnlyYou', `Aint That a Shame', `Sh-Boom') to '60 (`The Twist').
Lost innocence is a metaphor we can't get enough of in this country, and innocence is lost with profligate carelessness here. Bobby loses his, his childhood sweetheart (Mika Boorem) loses hers, his Mom loses hers in a scene where she must be the only person in the theater who doesn't see it coming. The country is poised to lose its as well, with low men skulking about and the faint shadow felt of a young candidate for President who will not live out his term.
You can't make a movie with this kind of talent and not wind up with some wonderful stuff. There are moments of real charm. Hope Davis is solid, youngsters Yelchin and Boorem are good, and Hopkins is impressive as always, though he often seems to be in another movie, reciting from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The photography by the late Piotr Sobocinski (Krzysztof Kieslowski's cameraman) is beautiful. But too much of the movie seems projected through a Hallmark card, dredged in treacle and powdered sugar. It may not be impossible to enjoy this movie, but it might well be embarrassing.
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