Jeanskynebu the audience applauded
SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie
CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
Devran ikiz Most films that are made in the 80's have special places in my heart. This is one of those films. Watching and getting familiarized with them tells a lot about the modern cinema. You can track the progress of great actors and actresses as well as the directors. I just finished watching "Places in the Heart," but it took me a lot of time to find this film. It is getting harder and harder to watch older films. Since this review will be the only source of this beautiful drama, I will try to write it good, so it will be a future reference for me. "Places in the Heart" is written and directed by Robert Benton, who is also known as the director and the screenplay writer of the five Oscar-winning film Kramer vs Kramer. "Places in the Heart" stars Sally Field, Ed Harris, John Malkovich, Lindsay Crouse and Danny Glover. Each and every performance is awesome in the film, but there must be a special note for Sally Field, as Edna Spalding, who plays the role of a widowed woman, left alone with her two kids in debt after her husband is shot. Her gestures and mimics help the atmosphere of the film a lot. There is a constant sorrow in her eyes and she really makes you forget the fact that she is actually acting. This performance got her an Academy Award for The Best Actress in a Leading Role, but it is not very easy to say that "Places in the Heart" is only about her. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards including The Best Picture, Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, Best Actor in a ing Role, John Malkovich, which as a blind guy, really deserved to win this award, Best Director, Best Actress in a ing Role, Lindsay Crouse and Best Costume Design. The reason why I counted all the nominations was to show you that three out of seven nominations were for the individual performances. That being said, performances are one of the strongest points of the film, as well as the story. As I was saying, "Places in the Heart" doesn't focus on one story. What makes this film complete, is the fact that there are a lot of little pieces gathered together. Film focuses on Edna Spalding and her kids after her husband dies, how she tries to get the hold of things around her life and her house. In the meantime, Moses (Danny Glover) shows us the real struggles of black people in Texas, USA in 1930s while working for Mrs. Spalding, and, in my opinion, because of this reality, "Places in the Heart" was critically acclaimed. On the other hand, there is a story of a blind guy, Mr. Will (John Malkovich) who moves into Edna's house and help her with almost everything. Unrelated to the main story among these three, we witness some other side stories in the town of Waxahachie, Texas, and these seemingly unrelated stories, focus on the reality of the lives that were lived around that era of 1930s.The harmony of side stories with the main story creates the strongest point of the film. As a drama and the atmosphere, "Places in the Heart" reminds me of Tender Mercies minus the songs. Soundtracks are not the strong points of this film, because it focuses on something directly related to the lives of white and black people once upon a time. The last scene of the film was in the church, where everyone, including the dead ones, gathered together drinking the wine and eating the bread. This somehow reveals the real purpose of the film. All the good and bad people are there together gathered around the god. "Places in the Heart" opens with a similar scene in the church. This film is a drama, it is a piece from real life, but in some scenes, I found myself unwillingly smiling. This is what happens to me when I watch a really good film. I always say for films like this, where nothing really happens, we just witness a period of time of some people's lives. "Places in the Heart" is a good example for this statement. Dresses and manners of people of that era are brilliant and real in the film, which made me ask, how we have arrived to the age of clowns from that era of gentlemen. To prove my statement, just go out sometime and observe people. The way they dress, the way they act and the way they talk will impress you. This is the beauty of old films. They help you make comparisons between eras, and make you understand and see towards where humanity is going. I know this has nothing to do with the film, but I had to mention this as well.
MartinHafer If you are looking for a film you'd describe as 'fun'....well, "Places in the Heart" is not the picture for you! However, it is still an exceptional film...lovingly made and well worth seeing.The film is set during the Great Depression. A Texas man is senselessly killed...leaving his wife with bills and two children to feed. Her situation looks pretty hopeless and the bank is recommending that she send her kids to live with relatives or a Home...which she will NOT do. With the help of a homeless black man (Danny Glover) and an unwilling blind boarder (John Malkovich), she struggles against all the odds to make a go of it.This is a very good film, filled with nice underplayed performances. My only quibble, and the reason I cannot give the film a 10, is that there is a subplot involving Ed Harris and Amy Madigan which simply has nothing to do with the rest of the film and is completely unnecessary. Still, you would have a hard time finding a better film from the era.
classicalsteve At the risk of sounding like I'm giving too much away, there's a strange bookend at the end. The film begins and ends in a typical south-mid-west Protestant church in America. Two characters who were killed at the beginning and appear again as the final two figures seen. If you haven't seen the film yet, you won't expect where they show up, and hopefully I won't be accused of offering a "spoiler". Endless speculation and debate about their reappearance has been written about ad infinitum, even by reviewers during the time of the film's initial release in the mid-1980's.The first scene is a Protestant church in rural America where "Rock of Ages" (not the Def Leppard version) is a mainstay of the musical repertoire. Edna Spalding (Sally Field in an Academy-Award winning performance) is the wife and mother in a family of four in the rural south in Texas in the midst of the Depression. She is married to the unquestioned man-of-the-house, Royce Spalding, the sheriff of this small town. As the film progresses, we learn his role in the family was far more than simply the "bread-winner". In addition to providing a good income, he took care of all bills, the finances, the mortgage on their house, even discipline.However, we don't learn about his role as head of the household by seeing him pay the mortgage and the bills, etc. At the very beginning of the story, Royce is killed at the hands of a young black man, Wylie, who was playing with a gun while drunk, a deadly combination. We get the sense Wylie had no intention of killing the white sheriff, but, as it was in those days, the accidental shooting signed the epitaph of Wylie as well. The two bodies are brought to their respective families and friends, with a brief appearance of the lynched Wylie being dragged behind a truck ed the house of the Spalding residence. This act will change the course of the Spalding family.After the social gathering mourning the deceased at the Spalding residence has ended, and the fried chicken and coffee cake have been consumed, Edna is dealt a curve ball care of the local bank via their powerless lackey, Mr. Denby (Lane Smith). After stating his willingness to help Edna in anyway, Mr. Denby tells her the bank would prefer if she sold their home and property in order to pay off the loan for the house. Inappropriately, he makes other suggestions about how to temporarily break up her family since they will be effectively homeless. (It is a snapshot into why life insurance became popular in the wake of the Depression.) She declines his suggestions and offers different ideas about how to create income for her family, but Denby rejects all of them, as if a woman was incapable of doing such things. His only concern is about the bank receiving its payment.However, Edna resolves to make a go of trying to create income for her family. She solicits the help of Moze (Danny Glover in an Academy-Award caliber performance), a middle-age black man who offered his help earlier in exchange for room and board. They decide to plant cotton in the nearly 40 acres of land owned by the Spaldings. Shortly thereafter, Mr Denby returns to the Spalding residence, and being the good Christian that he is, offers an arrangement which will make the bank happier about her keeping the property. He proposes to have his brother-in-law, Will (John Malkovich), a blind man injured in the Great War and currently unwanted by his family, to rent a room at the Spalding household as way to generate income. At first Edna declines the offer until she realizes she's not in a situation to refuse income, and so Will moves in, called Mr. Will by the kids and Moze.The five , Edna, Moze, Mr. Will and the children become a new family from the ashes of the old. During the story, Edna learns to do all the things her husband used to do, such as creating income and g checks, even disciplining the children with corporal punishment. At first, Mr. Will despises his circumstances, but gradually comes to care for and even love the children and Edna and even Moze. When a tornado descends upon the town, the family becomes unified in a way they hadn't expected. And towards the end, Mr. Will defends Moze, and this rings of some of the themes present in "To Kill a Mockingbird", both the book and film.There is one side story which distracts from the main storyline: Wayne, the husband of Edna's sister Margaret is having an affair with the local schoolteacher, Viola. Several scenes involve these other four characters interacting with one another. Unfortunately, these scenes were not as interesting as Edna et al, and it diminishes their storyline which is really the main focus of the film. As much as I like the talent of Ed Harris, Lindsay Crouse, and Amy Madigan I would have preferred their sequences cut with more screen time offered for the developing relationships between Edna, Moze, Mr. Will and the kids.Still, a fine film with incredible acting work. This may be the best acting of the three leads, plus honorable mention of the two young actors, Yankton Hatten and Gennie James as the kids Frank and Possum. Field certainly is as compelling as ever, but the other leads Glover and Malkovich not only keep up with her stride-for-stride, but make the story compelling from start to finish. And the two small roles of the sheriff and Wylie reappear at the very end, as if to remind us what led to the paths taken by the main characters.
David Conrad There's a super sweetness to "Places in the Heart," but it wears it well. The characters all have little failings, but nothing that can't be quickly overcome in the space of a tender, touching moment. Though many scenes walk right up to the line, they stop short of turning that well-earned tenderness into cloying sentimentality.The young, cherub-cheeked widow played by Sally Field is can-do-ism personified, and is perhaps more racially tolerant than the norm for 1930s Texas, especially considering that her husband has just been killed by a drunk, black youth. But the movie sells us on the idea that she has bigger problems to worry about than racial politics or even personal loss. The Depression is palpable throughout the movie, and it reshapes her life almost overnight. A neighbor is living in a car, paint on a nearby abandoned house says "Gone to California," and now, with the death of the family breadwinner, Field's character also appears to be headed for bust. Worse, she may lose custody of her two children. With no time to mourn, she has to take in a surly boarder (John Malkovich, thoroughly believable as the blind WWI veteran) and hire a black man who previously stole from her (Danny Glover) in a desperate attempt to stay afloat. If it seems all too predictable that her headstrong determination and positive spirit will prevail, that her worldly-wise black field hand will prove his worth, and that the bottled-up boarder will grudgingly reveal his sensitive side, well... it wears it well. Perhaps these characters should be thought of in the way that many of us like to think of our grandparents and great-grandparents: a little idealized in our minds, perhaps, but people who we believe were fundamentally good and who lived through difficult and transformative years in our history as soldiers, laborers, school children, and housewives. The final scene in the movie is a creative tracking shot that emphasizes the oneness of this diverse, often fragmented and antagonistic, yet familiar community that we have come to know. It is not just a Texas community, but an American one.It is hard to say what a slow-boiling side plot about marital infidelity, featuring a young and inscrutable Ed Harris, adds to the movie. There may be some thematic connection to a frightening sequence of a literally home-wrecking tornado. Or maybe it is a way to provide additional color by making the ing characters flawed and allowing the main ones to remain only nominally imperfect. In any case, this B-plot is not very creatively rendered, and it takes time away from the Malkovich and Glover characters whose private lives would surely be far more interesting but are too seldom seen. This shortcoming, though, does not prevent the main plot from being as affirming and moving as it strives to be.
