It was hard for me to watch "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things." I don't usually take well to films about child abuse (for obvious reasons), but I was willing to give this one a shot. I shouldn't have.
Asia Argento's directorial effort is based on the "autobiographical" novel by J.T. LeRoy, who is in fact not a real person, but a character devised by writer Laura Albert. It's the story of Jeremiah, a little boy taken from his foster home to live with his completely drug-addled and unfit mother, Sarah (Argento). After going through several boyfriends and one husband, who rapes Jeremiah after Sarah scarpers, the boy is left in the care of his strict Christian grandparents (Peter Fonda and Ornella Muti). After three years living and preaching under their creepy but more stable care, Sarah takes Jeremiah back and pulls him with her on her fast journey to rock bottom.
First of all, I have a hard time figuring out why any social worker would think Sarah was capable of caring for a child, seeing as how she's obviously gone off the deep end from the very beginning of the film. Secondly, I can't figure out why Sarah would want to have her son around, since he's obviously nothing but a burden to her. It's possible she wants the boy because he's the one person who truly loves her, but towards the end of the film, Sarah says that Jeremiah has caused her no end of trouble, and that she got along better on her own. The whole premise and logic of the film seems deeply flawed to me, not to mention Argento's one-sided, stereotypical and almost cartoonish representation of Christianity.
There are parts of the film that are well-shot and interesting, and it seems clear from the soundtrack (Sonic Youth, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Subhumans) and the oddball cameo roles (Peter Fonda, Winona Ryder and Marilyn Manson to name a few) that Argento is trying to make some kind of cheeky, badass punk rock film. But it's hard to consider the artistic value of a project when the subject matter is so disturbing. Meth labs and neglected children do not a masterpiece make.
I watch movies for two reasons, reasons I suspect are universal: entertainment and artistic merit. "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" is certainly not entertaining, and it hasn't got enough style to be considered a work of art. At the very least, this film could have served as a slap in the face, a cold stab of cruel realities we often ignore, like abuse and drug addiction, if J.T. LeRoy had been a real person. The fact that the story the film is based on was part of a major literary hoax takes away almost all its credibility. So instead I found myself subjected to one domestic horror after another, not in the service of telling someone's life story, but simply an exercize in sadistic, poorly realized fiction.