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.  

 

Older Doesn’t Always Mean Wiser: “Nobody’s Fool”

Why’d I watch a 1994 character piece called Nobody’s Fool? Partly it had to do with the death in May of writer/director Robert Benton, whose down-to-earth work I’d long admired. As a complete unknown, he co-wrote (with David Newman) Bonnie and Clyde, one of the most remarkable films of the remarkable film year 1967. Over a decade later he both wrote and directed Kramer vs. Kramer, winning himself two Oscars. And there was another Oscar in 1984, honoring his original script for Places in the Heart, a film based—I’m told—on his own Texas family. He directed that one too.  

 Watching Nobody Fool was my salute to Benton’s talent for making the everyday seem special and unique. It was also my tribute to co-star Jessica Tandy, for whom this was a final film. (The original Blanche DuBois died at age 85, just before the film’s release.)  Many others in the film’s cast are also no longer with us: it’s particularly poignant to see Philip Seymour Hoffman in the small but goofy role of a small town cop who’s a little too quick on the trigger. But of course the biggest loss has been that of star Paul Newman, who—then just shy of 70 years of age—was nominated yet again for a Best Actor Oscar for this role. (He lost to Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, but at this late point in his career Newman had already finally snagged a statuette for The Color of Money.) He would be nominated once more for 2002’s Road to Perdition, voiced a role in Disney’s Cars in 2006, and passed from the scene in 2008, at age 83. 

 Nobody’s Fool is poignant, but also quite funny. (At least some of the credit should go to novelist Richard Russo, who wrote the novel on which the film is based.) Set in the dead of winter in an upstate New York hamlet where everybody knows everybody’s business, it focuses on Donald “Sully” Sullivan, a sometimes-construction worker with a bum knee, an appreciation for poker, and a boyish enjoyment of playing tricks on his boss (Bruce Willis). He may seem happy-go-lucky, but there are dark memories of a drunken father and of his own greatest misstep: walking out on a wife and young son many years before. Though he only moved across town, Sully and his son have never re-connected. But the son is back now, with kids and problems of his own, and Sully finds himself in the odd position of needing to act like a grown-up. It’s a layered and thoroughly fascinating performance.  

 Part of what makes the film feel so lived-in is the casting of veteran actors who really help the fictional North Bath, New York feel like a community full of lovable eccentrics. There is, for instance, the rather inept lawyer (Gene Saks) who puts up his artificial leg as his stake in a poker game. Bruce Willis, who reportedly took a major pay cut for the chance to act with Newman, is memorable as the construction boss (and feckless womanizer) who makes Sully’s life miserable but owns a really classy red snow-blower that becomes a running joke. As Willis’s neglected wife, Melanie Griffith is her appealing self. 

 What’s really striking about Newman’s character is that—for all his reputation as a ne’er-do-well—he turns out to be one of the kindest souls in town. It’s his kindness that Jessica Tandy sees in him when she refuses to stop being his landlady, despite her own son’s bluster. Yes, he’s a nuisance, but we sure need more of his ilk.