HEARTS IN ATLANTIS (director: Scott Hicks; screenwriters: William Goldman /Stephen King novel; cinematographer: Piotr Sobocinski; 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), Will Rothhaar (Sullivan), Dierdre O'Connell (Mrs. Gerber), Timothy Reifsnyder (Harry Doolin); Runtime: 101; Warner Brothers; 2001)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Australian director Scott Hicks (Shine/Snow Falling on Cedars) has adapted a Stephen King novel for his latest film. It's a film that has the promise of being a horror story but that never quite comes together, as the film plays more like a schmaltzy nostalgia piece and bland character study about an all-American child of the 1950s, Bobby Garfield, who is in a bland coming-of-age film. The 11-year-old Bobby (the child-Anton Yelchin) is befriended by an eccentric older man who boarded in his widowed mom's private house during the summer of 1960.
The story is told in flashback by the adult Bobby Garfield (the adult-David Morse). He is a middle-aged photographer who receives via Fed Ex a package containing an old baseball glove from his childhood friend Sully (Will Rothhaar), a glove he once coveted. Sully has just passed away. This inheritance stirs up childhood memories, as he goes back for the funeral and visits his childhood neighborhood of low-income private houses on quiet tree-lined streets in Norwich, Connecticut, and he recalls that eventful summer and his intense friendship with Sully and the first girl he kissed Carol Gerber (Mika Boorem). She's a sweet blonde, whose kiss on the stalled Ferris wheel will be the one he will judge all other kisses. He's saddened to learn at the funeral that she is also dead. When he moved at the end of that summer to Massachusetts they never corresponded and lost contact, even though they promised to always keep in contact.
The problem with this look back at his childhood memories is that we are being overwhelmed with an orgy of nostalgia-- from the Platter's singing rock & roll, flashy vintage cars, the Lone Ranger on TV, and many other memories from the early 1960s. There's not much of a story here that isn't a contrivance, or dripping with goo, or heading nowhere.
It's basically a film about Anthony Hopkins hamming it up as Ted Brautigan the mysterious stranger who comes with his possessions in a shopping bag to stay at Liz Garfield's working class neighborhood residence, renting out her attic space and forming a father-son relationship with the boy who craves a father figure to counter his self-absorbed mother who selfishly has no time or committment to love him since her husband died six years ago leaving her broke and having to work as a secretary in a real-estate office. She instantly doesn't like Ted, at first saying she doesn't trust anyone who moves with shopping bags, to later suspecting him of being a homosexual, and finally to just not feeling comfortable with him. The viewer is led to believe that Ted might be a possible child molester, a discharge from a mental asylum, a harmless transient, or someone being hunted by the Mafia or FBI. He doesn't appear to be the wise and spiritual man he's passing himself off as. And he doesn't appear to be a great seer, or someone who is very sensitive because he was hurt. If he was a mind-reader, why would he tell the woman who hates his guts where he's going when there are unfriendly people offering a reward for him!
As the friendship grows between the boy and the stranger, we are forced to hear such banal profundities from the pen of King uttered through the lips of Hopkins as: "Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living in someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been." He also reflects: "Then we grow up, and our hearts break into two."
He gives the kid a root beer on his visits to the attic; pays to have the kid read the newspaper to him and keep watch on strangers in town he calls the "low men;" advises him on which classics to read (the kid chooses "Lost Horizon"), as he now has an adult library card thanks to his mother's birthday gift; and, he tells the impressionable kid, whom he calls kiddo to my dismay, that he's on the run from the "low men" who are dangerous thugs who drive flashy cars and wear dark suits and fedoras and who put up deceptive posters for lost pets all over town to locate him. Who these "low men" are is never answered, by we are eventually led to believe that they could be FBI men who want to use his psychic gifts to help them flesh out Commies and read minds. Needless to say, the kid also finds that he has temporary psychic powers as he goes to a country fair and tests his skills with a card shark and wins. This comes after mom warns him to never play cards for money like his dad, whom she said was a loser.
Everything about this film felt loaded down with good versus evil characters, with situations that seemed manufactured and did not have any flow to them. The scene that annoyed me the most, was that formulaic bully scene between Harry Doolin who is not only a bully who beats up Carol and Bobby, but he's also an in-the-closet queer who calls Bobby a queer to draw attention away from him. You can bet your Schwinn Black Phantom bike that Bobby will get physical revenge on him before this gooey pic ends. In fact you can guess how everything will turn out because there's no real story in this failed mystery story. The film's all about a contrived atmospheric mood it sets in mystery to lead you to believe something is going on, as it hopes your imagination will be better than the author's in finishing the story.
In the end Hopkins' portrayal is too creepy and ambivalent to draw any conclusion about what all his inward hurt means and why he seems so strange and saddened. We never see any of the lead characters develop or really get to know them, we are only led to what they might be or what they represent. Everyone seemed like a cardboard character waiting for either the "low men" to emerge or for another trite golden nugget of wisdom to fall from the lips of Hopkins. This film isn't even good enough to be considered a middle-brow art-house film, as it's a commercial film that tries to be a little off-kilter with little to offer in the way of suspense.
REVIEWED ON 10/14/2001 GRADE: C -
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
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