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Movies are all about playing on emotion. So it shouldn't be surprising how many titles have made reference to the coronary organ, which, thanks to the Greeks and other ancient cultures far more poetic than ours, we still have a tendency to consider the seat of non-intellectual behavior (thank goodness they had evolved past the point of even more primitive humanity, who placed the soul a little farther south in the body cavity; can you imagine people lining up for admission to something titled The Kidney Is a Lonely Hunter? "You saw the kidneywarming film -- now read the kidneybreaking book!"). Browsing through the all-knowing Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) yields seven Change of Heart's; four each of The Telltale Heart and Heart and Soul; three of Cross My Heart, Fighting Heart, and Deep in the Heart (not counting those that then go on to invoke Texas); and seventy titles from the silent era alone that begin with Heart of ___, from The Heart of the Yukon to The Heart of a Mermaid to the intriguing The Heart of a Cracksman. There was even one that will forever put me off a certain menu item from Chinese restaurants, considering the proclivity in some Oriental nations to procure an entree from the kennel: Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart.
Ergo, as Natalie Portman seeks to progress from adolescent prodigy to bona fide star (she could hardly count on a Star Wars chapter to ensure her adult career; when was the last time you heard of Mark Hamill doing anything besides voices for "Batman" cartoons?), it's understandable she would start with a safe, mass-market opener such as Where the Heart Is (which was also the title of a 1990 film, featuring Dabney Coleman and Uma Thurman, described by Video Movie Guide 2000 as "mindless drivel about a demolition expert's fall from wealth"). In it she sports ample, uncomfortable-looking padding to play Novalee Nation, a penniless, superstitious, barely literate, genuinely barefoot and pregnant unwed teen fleeing cross-country from a squalid Tennessee trailer park that puts the "rash" in "white trash." When her boyfriend Willy Jack (Dylan Bruno, from The Rage: Carrie 2), a mullet-headed aspiring country singer, abandons her at a smalltown Oklahoma Wal-Mart (not one of those 24-hr. deals), she takes advantage of apparent local aversion to burglar alarms and night guards to finish out the remaining six weeks of her pregnancy spending nights in the store.
Following the baby's birth, an initial wave of mostly sympathetic publicity, and a brief, traumatic appearance by her own itinerant mother (Sally Field), she's informally adopted by the local alcoholic Welcome Wagon lady (Stockard Channing) and sets down roots, lacking anywhere else to go. But Sequoyah, OK, turns out to be as nearly a welcome place for strangers as tornadoes, and she and daughter Americus quickly develop a relatively stable -- to her, anyway -- support structure: fellow unwed mom Lexie (Ashley Judd), who's so fertile she seems to be seeking fame as the first soccer mom with an entire team in the family; a troubled New England librarian (James Frain -- Reindeer Games) who encourages her to read and becomes a functional father to her child; and the Wal-Mart portrait guy (Keith David), who nurtures her burgeoning photographic talent.
It's a big, sweeping. dust bowl melodrama that, despite being an ode to casual birth control and horrid decision-making, oozes sincerity. And karma -- occasional sidebars track the progress of Willy Jack's career out West following his ungentlemanly parking-lot impulse. Though the script, adapted by comedy icons Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (City Slickers and A League of Their Own, among many others) from Billie Letts' novel, sometimes lays the homespun lyricism on rather thick, and first-time director Matt Williams (best known for creating sitcoms "Roseanne" and "Home Improvement") throws in an almost laughable tornado sequence straight from Oz, Portman still manages to shine through as the child/mother ravaged by the unpleasantness of adulthood. A wonderful supporting cast, including some great walk-in bit players, help make Where the Heart Is a triumph of fine acting over occasionally heavy-handed filmmaking.
Plus, I learned something new: it is okay to use the word "fornication" in a PG-13 movie, but in the trailers it must be bleeped out and replaced with "whoopee." B
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