Natalie Portman has lost her way. Critics greeted her 11-year-old acting debut in 1994's "The Professional" with praise for the film and surprise about Portman's quality acting and maturity beyond her years. Then, in Ted Demme's excellent and insightful "Beautiful Girls," her acting somehow became the center of the entire movie, overshadowing such famous names as Timothy Hutton, Rosie O'Donnell, Mira Sorvino, and Uma Thurman.
Even in the overly dramatic "Anywhere But Here," her performance held the movie together and transformed it into a solid film. But with Matt Williams's new "Where the Heart Is," Portman chose a cinematic disaster that not even her acting ability could have saved.
The badly written and poorly executed "Where the Heart Is" is based on a Billie Letts novel that became a bestseller only because Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. Portman plays Novalee Nation, a pregnant teenager who leaves her rural home with her boyfriend while exclaiming, "I've never lived in a place that didn't have wheels under it!"
Her one-dimensional and callous boyfriend (Dylan Bruno) abandons her in the parking lot of a Midwestern Wal-Mart with nothing but a few dollars and a plastic shoulder bag. Not knowing much about the world, Novalee decides to live in the Wal-Mart for six weeks -- apparently hiding in the bathroom and using Wal-Mart sleeping bags -- until she finally gives birth to a baby girl and eventually becomes the talk of the town.
Wal-Mart photographer Moses Whitecotton (Keith David) emphasizes the importance of solid names when he tells Novalee, "Give that baby a name that means something!"
Nave Novalee then responds by naming her girl the conspicuously meaningless and asinine "Americus," which kicks off the tone for the entire film. Nothing about the film is logical, almost no character ever does anything rational, and none of them show any glimmer of intelligence.
Much of this problem is the shallow and inconsistent screenplay. In the spirit of Ridley Scott's outstanding "Thelma and Louise," all of the men in "Where the Heart Is" are disagreeable characters who have few redeeming qualities. But unlike Scott's film where this choice compliments its theme, the detestable lead men in "Where the Heart Is" are entirely one-dimensional and are present apparently only to make the film's dim-witted women more likeable.
In fact, Willy Jack Pickens (Novalee's boyfriend) wins the Plot Device of the Year Award due to his one-dimensionality, heartlessness and character inconsistency. Despite the fact that Willy leaves Novalee at the Wal-Mart in the movie's beginning, the film continues to torturously follow the events in Willy's life despite the fact that they have nothing to do with Novalee and hold no interest for the viewer. When an audience cheers for a character (in this case, Willy) to get hit by a train only in hope that the director will end the recounting of his unbearable tale, it's certain that the film has problems.
But it's not until the movie's ending that we discover why Williams has subjected us to this agonizing side-story; Willy returns solely to give Novalee some uncharacteristically poetic and thoughtful advice that allows the movie to reach its nauseating finale. How Willy grows a brain in the film's final five minutes is a complete mystery.
Aside from Willy, this problem of character inconsistency appears in other instances throughout the film. Forney -- the mild-mannered librarian who falls in love with Novalee -- first appears in the movie depicted as an insane, jumpy and absurd bookkeeper who never shows his face and sprints around the library aimlessly.
However, in the remaining scenes, he is portrayed as an insipid male who does nothing more than drool over Novalee and bore viewers to tears. The screenplay never reveals why he is schizophrenic, why Novalee falls in love with him or why Bowdoin College would decide to accept this twit.
In another example, Williams shows Novalee making an itemized list of money she owes to Wal-Mart after living there for six weeks.
Despite this, when Novalee receives $500 in the mail from Sam Walton (Wal-Mart's owner) after giving birth in the store, it never occurs to her to repay Wal-Mart. The movie never addresses the topic again for its remainder, even when characters finally get married in a hokey Wal-Mart wedding. Based on this, these scenes are probably what they seem -- shameless advertisements for the Wal-Mart Corporation.
When the screenplay isn't presenting inconsistencies, it's plain stupid. It feels like the writers strung together melodramatic tragedies until they filled two hours. And while their decision to not use a voiceover narrative (always too common with book adaptions) is commendable, the huge and disconnected time jumps feel clumsy.
Furthermore, the silly, elementary dialogue such as, "Our lives can change with every breath we take," and "We've all got meanness in us, but we've got good too" provoke nothing but audience groans.
Viewers can accept that Lexie (Ashley Judd) had four children and named them after snack foods (Brownie, Cherry, Praline and Baby Ruth), but when she continuously becomes pregnant and enters into abusive relationships without ever learning her lesson, it's hard to decide whether only Lexie is brainless or screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel are the clueless ones.
And it gets worse. In one scene, a strangely four-handed Novalee manages to defeat a tornado by grabbing on to a wooden storm shelter's stairs while at the same time grabbing her daughter who is almost sucked into the twister. And nothing makes up for the too-predictable ending that insults everyone who goes to see the movie.
Richard Greatrex's photography manages to add some originality to this otherwise uninspired movie, for example, with shots of Novalee alone in the Wal-Mart parking lot which manage to convey her isolation.
In addition, the strange use of establishing shots (a close-up of a plump man's belly at the beginning of a strange photo shoot) add some innovation to the film.
Character-wise, there's one breath of fresh air in Joan Cusack's appearance as a singing agent. At least she's not taking herself so seriously.
Unfortunately, Williams' directing doesn't take any hint from Cusack. One of the movie's most laughable scenes occurs when Novalee has sex with Forney. The scene could not have been directed with more artificiality.
Intrusive music, manifest back-lighting, soft whispers and a shot of their hands linking in front of a window are all heavy-handed techniques that shouldn't be expected from Williams, the producer of the hard-hitting "Roseanne."
The editing of the movie also tends to be slow, making some simple conversations excruciatingly long.
And while none of this is directly Portman's fault, her beyond-her-years, edgy acting style has taken a backseat to her taking herself and the material too seriously. Her relentless sweetness and beauty aren't enough to make up for bland, inane and heavy-handed melodrama.
Now that Portman has grown up and gone to Harvard, she needs to make grown-up choices. Her decision to make "Where the Heart Is" was not a grown-up choice.
