Home is Where the Heart Is: Places in the Heart

Sadly, actor and activist Danny Glover, perhaps best known for his cop role opposite Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon series, has acknowledged he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Always a straightforward guy, he’d previously been frank about his youthful struggles with epilepsy. Now, close to 80, he’s looking back at a career that has given him a wide range of character roles in both wacky comedies and somber dramas. His favorite? He acknowledges that he’s most proud of a 1984 slice of Americana called Places in the Heart.

  As a tribute to Glover, and as a salute to the growing-pains of the USA in its semiquincentennial year, I recently caught up with Places in the Heart. It’s definitely a small film worth knowing, and not just because her leading role in it won Sally Field her second Oscar, and the opportunity to gush to the Academy that "I can't deny the fact that you like me—right now, you like me!" (Personally, I can’t deny the fact that most people misquote her words as “You like me—you really like me!”)

  Places in the Heart was written and directed by the late Robert Benton, who in 1967 came out of New York to co-write (along with fellow Esquire journalist David Newman) an historically -based screenplay they called Bonnie and Clyde. Their script—about a pair of attractive young bank robbers gallivanting through the Southwest during the Great Depression—eventually led to a production deal. After some serious interest from François Truffaut, Arthur Penn ultimately shot Bonnie and Clyde, with  Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the leading roles. It became a national sensation and scored 10 Oscar noms in a highly competitive year.   

 After that triumph, Benton pursued his interest in directing as well as writing, winning Oscars in both categories for the 1979 divorce drama, Kramer vs. Kramer. But he was a native Texan, and perhaps that dry, dusty landscape continued to call to him. In 1984, he returned to his roots, crafting a Depression-era story set in Waxahachie, Texas, with nary a bank robber in sight. Life is not easy in Waxahachie: Edna Spalding (Sally Field) has been left a widow after the accidental killing of her husband, the local sheriff. Desperate to support herself and her young children, she takes in a boarder, a bitter ex-soldier (John Malkovich) who lost his sight during the Great War. She also takes pity on the African-American drifter (Glover) who shows up to do chores, even though he’s been caught trying to steal her silverware. Edna’s basic good-heartedness proves contagious, and a viable new household forms. But there are also many external challenges: the bank is eager to foreclose on Edna’s acreage; her sister’s marriage is threatened by a philandering spouse; a powerful tornado (dramatically filmed) flattens the town’s center; the Ku Klux Klan violently turns on Glover’s character. Somehow Edna holds on, leading to a remarkable final scene in which love and redemption surface in a way that can only be called mystical. 

 1985 was a year of BIG movies, led by Amadeus, A Passage to India, and a powerful drama about journalists covering the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, The Killing Fields. Folksy Americana hardly seemed like one of the film-year’s major areas of interest.  But Places in the Heart, a loving, inspiring, and yet down-to-earth portrait of small-town life, holds its own among the costume epics.

 I wish Danny Glover well, and hope he’ll be able to cling onto his memories of being a central figure in this tender film.