It is rare that I feel so utterly and completely mortified, frustrated and disgusted by a film, despite its brilliance. After watching Asia Argento’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and discovering the source material came from a literary figure who was fabricated, my initial response was, “What next?” The film itself is problematic and flawed enough without this additional layer of confusion trying to fob itself off as intrigue.
After doing a bit of research I discovered that JT LeRoy’s novel : The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things , was actually written by Laura Albert, who cultivated the alias down to dressing her boyfriend’s half-sister, Savannah Knoop, as the teenage boy. Knoop then proceeded to make guest appearances at book releases and other promotional events. Albert claimed that the persona of JT was a “veil” that permitted her to write things she couldn’t as herself. Of course, novelists employ different narrators all the time without feeling the need to create non-existent human beings. We needn’t trouble ourselves by asking how many additional books she might have sold by writing from the viewpoint of the victim or suggesting the content was actual or true.
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is a devastating, harrowing descent into the story of a young boy, Jeremiah, who is legally appropriated from his foster parents by his 23-year-old, biological mother, Sarah. It is painfully clear that Sarah (Asia Argento) has fought tooth and nail for her second shot at motherhood, and also clear that it’s the worst thing she possibly could have done. There is so much about THIDAAT that’s inexplicable that it’s difficult to know where to begin. That said, it is beyond poignant, heart-breaking, grueling, unforgettable. The fact that it lives up to the expectations set by its title is reason enough to be impressed. The film is not just deeply affecting, it’s wounding. You can’t watch and you can’t turn away. The misery is almost without relief, which may the secret of its attraction . You keep thinking that somehow Jeremiah’s (Jimmy Bennett) rescue is imminent. You stick with the movie thinking that eventually some form of karmic justice will prevail.
The character of Sarah, played by the director, looks like a cross between Uma Thurman and Courtney Love. In the best and worst possible sense. I am not saying this to be snide or deprecating. I believe part of the key to THIDAAT is Sarah’s appearance and emotional turmoil. When you look at the cover art from the disc, or the poster, she is drawn with wings and horns. This isn’t the typical struggle we all cope with when making ethical choices in our lives. This is injecting Agnes of God with a live dose of rabies. At first we consider the possibility she gained custody out of devotion and maternal instinct. We take it in stride when she feeds him cold spaghetti-os from a paper plate or sleeps with her thumb in her mouth. Then the parade of atrocities begins.
As it becomes more and more apparent how deeply unhappy Jeremiah is with his new living arrangements, Sarah, just like an older, bigger, aggressive child starts finding ways to get even. She won’t let Jeremiah speak to his foster parents, she tells him they didn’t want him anymore, she tells him he’s the result of incestuous rape by his grandfather. But it doesn’t stop there. She feeds him speed, she leaves him in the car while she has loud, shrieking sex with a cowboy she just met named Luther, she helps Luther beat the shit out of Jeremiah for pissing himself without drawing attention from the neighbors. “I’m going to give you a beating you can be proud of,” he tells the terrified boy as Sarah stuffs a sock in his mouth. Her pleasure in witnessing this spectacle is unmistakable. And it’s just one more sickening display after another. You’ll have to take my word for it when I say I’m not a reactionary (at least, no more so than any other critic) but I can’t remember when I hated a character more.
During this road trip shared by mother and son, we see Sarah selling sex for money, abusing drugs, leaving Jeremiah for days by himself, cross-dressing him for her own amusement and repeatedly putting him in danger. It’s not necessarily that she resorts to prostitution or self-medication, it’s her complete lack of desire to protect him from situations no child should ever have to endure. Towards the end of the film she has the mind-numbing chutzpah to tell the son she’s repeatedly taken against his will that he has ruined her life. That she always landed on her feet when he wasn’t around to mess things up. If there were a God, the kid would have landed a haymaker to her jaw. But there the beautiful boy sits, believing every word that drips from the diseased mind of his solipsistic mother, suffering from what may very well be a form of Stockholm Syndrome.
There is a great deal of poisonous wisdom in the film. Argento uses an hallucinogenic, surreal approach that seems appropriate to the trauma that taints Jeremiah’s life on a daily basis. The fuzzy, documentary style is spot on and we come to recognize how sinister and complicated the world can be. How the boy grows to respond more to abuse than neglect like so many of us could and might. How the joy is beaten out of him and he’s forced to depend on his mother, a spiv from the word go. He doesn’t run away because his mother forges dependency based on isolation and terror. Jeremiah has learned to make himself invisible while his mother goes from one psychotic episode to the next, or her latest conquest waits to explode. When Jeremiah is temporarily adopted by his grandparents the harsh, deranged behavior towards him continues, but (and this is an example of where the film slips) in comparison to “Life with Mommy” it seems like paradise. When Sarah finds him preaching on the street and whisks him away, you just want to weep.
At the core of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is the dynamic between Jeremiah and Sarah. You can understand why Jeremiah comes to love his mother, she’s intensely unhappy, angry, damaged and pathetic. You don’t have to be a genius, a therapist or even remotely sensitive to surmise that Sarah is probably inflicting her son with same abominations that she herself was subjected to. There are particular moments that suggest we’re supposed to see her as some kind of desperate, junky princess version of Auntie Mame, which under the circumstances, is laughable and repugnant. Because this sweet kid hasn’t been reduced to a catatonic in-patient, I guess we’re supposed to dismiss much of her toxic behavior as antics. This is where The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things falls apart. It gambles on our capacity to appreciate or at least comprehend Sarah.
We can’t shake our heads and say that tragedy befalls everyone’s life. That’s true, but this isn’t fate, this is Sarah, refusing to relinquish a son she claims to love and wants nothing to do with. The only explanation that makes any sense is her need to rob Jeremiah of a the life she’s been denied, despite what she tells her heart. And while this is all too human, and understandable, it’s like asking us to forgive a flea, for vomiting the plague into our veins.