HEAVY
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper
CAPSULE: HEAVY is both a story and a film
about how film works. It is at once an intense
emotional experience and a study of how dialogue
affects the tone and strength of a film. The story
is of the people who can nightly be found at
small-town tavern, people whose lives are basically
the same from one day to the next. The film
especially concentrates on the overweight cook,
Victor, a child-man almost too shy to talk and
having a mid-life crisis. HEAVY packs more of an
emotional wallop than any film so far this year.
Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4)
It is a familiar viewpoint that color in a film actually distracts the viewer and mutes the emotional impact of the film's camerawork. What is less commonly observed is that dialogue may actually do much the same thing. We have seen the overly florid gesturing of silent film acting, much of which looks silly today. But some silent films were extremely intense emotional pieces in their day. Perhaps as much of the emotional potential of film was lost with sound film as was lost with color. HEAVY is a color film, and a sound film, but it functions very much as a silent film would. Almost all of the story is conveyed either in visual images or in single lines of dialogue, perhaps appropriate to title cards in silent films. Of course the film is not lacking in dialogue, but the dialogue is almost never used to move the plot along. It adds a little color and background interest to the film, but it is rarely used to advance the plot. This is a film that owes much more to the traditions of silent film than to those of the sound era. By forcing the viewer to carefully watch the characters, very different information can be imparted to the viewer and the technique focuses attention on the emotions of the characters.
Most of the action takes place in and around Pete and Dolly's Restaurant, a bar and restaurant in a small New England town. Pete has been dead for years and his widow Dolly (Shelley Winters) still blames waitress Delores (Deborah Harry in a surprisingly textured role) for a liaison with Pete. When Dolly hires an attractive teenager Callie (Liv Tyler) to help out there is immediate resentment from Delores. Caught between the two is Victor (Pruitt Taylor Vince), Dolly's son somewhere in his 30s. Victor is so stigmatized by his own obesity and so dominated by his mother that it is all he can do to occasionally speak. He is very much attracted to Callie but cannot bring himself to have a conversation with her. Instead he decides to try to reinvent himself, taking up dieting and investigating a local cooking school. But he must fight the forces of his own inertia and that of his mother who wants to keep him in his present job. He fantasizes about being a hero and saving Callie. Soon Victor's life, which has been static for so many years, starts to change violently. His reaction and his behavior when those changes come is totally unexpected. Little of this are we told about, it is almost all shown to us and Victor's quiet nature is perfect for the visual style of storytelling. The same story could have been lightened by comedy but writer and director James Mangold takes a very realistic approach and rarely strays from it.
This is a very precisely directed film and it has many very nice subtle touches. As an example of the directing technique, to underscore Victor's image of himself, there is a scene in which he looks at a stack of photographs. Gingerly he places each on a table after looking at it. When he gets to a picture of himself he puts it down with a small slam. Small and subtle touches do what another story would simply tell with dialogue.
In general the production values speak of a film made well on a low budget. The colors were not particularly rich, indicating a less- expensive print. But the performances are all very powerful. Pruitt Taylor Vince's acting gets more and more intense as the film goes on. Mangold moves his story with a slow and deliberate speed, but completely pulls the viewer into the lives of his characters and particularly Victor's life.
The usual way of saying it is that one "sees" a film, but for most films much more of the story is conveyed in the dialogue than the visuals. HEAVY is truly a film one sees rather than hears. Mangold's experiment in visual storytelling may not have a lot of application to other films, but it works extremely well in this film. I would rate HEAVY a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
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