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Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you’re living in someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been… then we grow up and our hearts break into two.
The quote is right from the script. Hearts in Atlantis is
based on a Stephen King book of the same name which is a series of related stories with a
linking theme of the Viet Nam war. The film though, drawn from just one of the stories,
has little or nothing to do with the Viet Nam war and, aside from the weak allusion above,
the title is appropriate only for the purpose of drawing box office from fans of the
book..
It's the Stephen King formula once again. Take a fairly standard set of
characters--a young widow and her son and his friends--and inject a newcomer, a stranger
with mysterious powers being followed by unknown pursuers. The newcomer here is Ted
Brautigan, played by Anthony Hopkins and Hopkins is the best thing the film has to offer;
the guy could read the Manhattan phone book and make it sound dramatic and profound.
But Brautigan's powers are only marginally mysterious: he's a psychic,
a telepath, able to read people's minds. Those who touch him become psychic, too. The men
chasing him down are never identified, but veteran screenwriter William Goldman (All
the President's Men, Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) telescopes the solution early in the game--there's
an article in the newspaper that the FBI is hunting down psychics who are believed to aid
the enemy. And when glimpses of the pursuers are offered, they're all in suits and ties
and fedoras just like the FBI guys wore back then.
The center of the story is eleven year old Bobby Garfield (Anton
Yelchin) whose Dad is dead and whose mother (Hope Davis) is self-centered, claiming
poverty to Bobby when he wants a bike, even as she buys herself a wardrobe of dressy
frocks. Not only that, she blames their impecunious state on her late husband and his
gambling ways, depriving Bobby of even the memory of a good Dad. When Brautigan rents a
room in their house, he and Bobby quickly bond and things (ever so slowly) start to
happen.
There are some broad themes running through the film, paralleled
between the mother's experience and that of Bobby and his friends--violence from bullies,
lies uncovered. But the characterizations are stock and the film is plot-driven, never
getting under the surface or offering fresh insight. It is further weighted down by the
performance of young Yelchin (Along
Came a Spider) which all too often seems calculated, overacted and cutesy.
Hope Davis (Arlington Road,
Mumford) is appropriately
hateful as the mother, but never manages to convey a deeper side to the character which
would temper her faults with sympathy. Aside from Hopkins, the scene-stealer of the film
is Mika Boorem (The Patriot, Along
Came a Spider) whose smile and natural charm fill up the screen with a quality of
spontaneity and genuineness otherwise sorely missing.
Director Scott Hicks (Shine)
worked here with the late cinematographer Piotr
Sobocinski (to whom the film is
dedicated) and together they created a lush style with memorable visuals: the sun at dusk
glowing on railroad tracks that curve through the woods, the colors and lights of a Ferris
wheel at night, a red maple in full leaf, a closeup of sunlight turning the girl's golden
hair to red. (Hicks' previous film, Snow
Falling on Cedars showed a similar eye for exquisitely lit, atmospheric
shots.) The story is placed in Connecticut and it was filmed in Virginia, but it fails to
evoke any real sense of place; it's a sort of generic small town America. A soundtrack
full of period music is more of a distraction than an enhancement and old cars and
wardrobe don't manage to coalesce into a genuine period feeling either.
Audaciously,
