GRACE OF MY HEART
A film review by Dave Cowen
Copyright 1996 Dave Cowen
Just into the second act of GRACE OF MY HEART came a disarming moment which I was never quite able to recover from. Up until that moment the casting of the film was contemporary and vibrant: John Turturro and Eric Stoltz give hilariously fast-talking performances, while Bridget Fonda steals the show as a disturbed Lesley Gore. However, after seeing punkers Redd Cross strike Gen-X poses over Matt Dillon and leer at a theremin player making horrible noise during a failed studio session modeled after the Beach Boys' sessions while producing the never-released _Smile_, I knew that I couldn't quite trust the film any longer.
In GRACE OF MY HEART, Illeana Douglas plays Edna Buxton, a "willful" young woman who swaps dresses and musical numbers at the last minute in order to wow the crowd at a talent audition, finding herself the winner of a recording contract in New York. That recording contract never comes, and Edna finds herself destitute in New York. A crying fit at an audition nets her a lunch meeting with nice hebrew boy Joel Millner, played by John Turturro as if he were the Barton Fink of the music business, who convinces her to change her name and become a songwriter. The film follows Edna, loosely modeled on Carol King, through two decades of hits, misses, and her three failed relationships with industry insiders.
Director Allison Anders literally races through the first half of the film, favoring distracting jump cuts between lines of dialogue and quick montages to lay out Edna's rise as one of the premier songwriters of the Brill Building era. First encounters with Turturro, Eric Stoltz's Howard Cazsatt and Bridget Fonda's Kelly Porter border on the berzerk, bringing the film an endearing manic quality. The use of original music, written by the likes of Los Lobos and Elvis Costello, saves this first half of the film from the kind of false sentimentality that usually grounds films similar to GRACE in nature.
After speeding through a brief relationship with a timid DJ, played by Bruce Davison, GRACE OF MY HEART takes a left turn when Matt Dillon's character Jay Phillips is introduced. Dillon brings to his character a deliberately dazed impression of Beach Boys leader/producer Brian Wilson. Dillon gets the carefully studied mannerisms and motions right, but ultimately seems out of place in the part -- his teen idol reputation obscures the boyish quality that the real Brian Wilson always seems to exhibit. The film strikes an eerie note as Phillips and Buxton marry: while Dillon's Brian Wilson may not be entirely convincing, Illeana Douglas is a dead ringer for Wilson's real-life ex-wife, Marilyn.
The pace of the film slows as it portrays Phillip's descent into paranoia and isolation. As an exploration of the downfall of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, the film provides a fascinating portrait -- but as the film shifts focus from Edna to Jay, it begins to lose the emotional bond that the audience had created with Edna. At the end of the second act, an acceptably accurate portrayal of Brian Wilson's life is completely invalidated by a drastic action, and the film's tone switches again.
As followers of the Beach Boys know, Brian Wilson began to live his life in bed, gaining weight hundreds of pounds over his normal size and isolating his wife. Earlier in the second act, Edna explains to rival songwriter Cheryl that she would stay with Brian no matter how far he descended into madness. In real life, that ended up in years of isolation for Wilson's wife, and an eventual break-up -- and I had completely assumed that the plot would continue to follow Wilson's life into order to make an ironic point about Edna's useless relations with men. However. instead of continuing to use Wilson's life as a drive for the film, Anders forcibly steers the script away from the Phillips character in order to finish the film with an ending which paints a much more rosy picture of Edna's life than would seem necessary.
Throughout the first two acts, GRACE OF MY HEART is an invigorating film: and unlike many other viewers who have found the second act to be tedious, I was perfectly happy to accept the change in tone between the first and second acts, possibly out of my personal interest in Brian Wilson's life. In the final minutes of the film, however, Anders drops both the manic energy of the first half and the biographical portrait of the second in favor of Hollywood-style schmaltz.
As much as the film has extremely glaring faults, I do have to recommend it. There's a lot to like in the film: Turturro fills his scenes with charm, and Douglas is positively radiant. Only the poor editing of the first half, where Anders compresses time to a ridiculous extent (in one scene, Anders doesn't even give Edna three seconds to walk over and greet a character, instead cutting directly to their embrace) and the distressingly commercial finale lowers my impression of the film. At the very least, fans of Brian Wilson should get a tremendous kick out of Dillon's maligned impression -- and fans of the music of the 50's and early 60's should be very pleased by the original music..
Dave Cowen (esch@fische.com) Eschatfische. -------------------------------- http://www.fische.com
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