Italian filmmaker Dario Argento is considered the all time great horror maestro, with films like Suspiria and Inferno on his resume. HIs daughter, Asia Argento, is an aspiring young filmmaker and actress with a few films under her belt. Her latest, with a title as agonizingly interminable as the film itself, is a near-shameful entry into the oeuvre of her family. It’s torture porn meets melodrama meets senseless violence meets, well, porn. There is not one image in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things that did not disturb, annoy, or offend me.
Based (loosely, I presume) on a short story by J.T. LeRoy, Argento’s film stars herself as an irresponsible teenage mother and Jimmy Bennett as Jeremiah, her seven-year-old son dragged from the comparatively heavenly foster home and thrust into a world of sexual and physical abuse. No film excites me more than one that sets out to toss countless disturbing images at my face for unidentifiable reasons. Schindler’s List portrays offensive events and images because it’s telling the true story of the Holocaust; Argento is like a kid at a carnival game, aimlessly tossing darts with the hope of finally hitting one emotion-filled baloon. Instead, I was the little specimen of inflatable latex in the corner defiantly refusing to pop. Having said that, it is claimed that LeRoy based the story (again, presumably loosely) on some aspects of his childhood. I pray for his soul. The reason I resort to perhaps unjustified assumptions about the faithfulness of the adaptation is that the way Argento presents the events implies that anyone who endured them would be too emotionally scarred to be able to relive them as catharsis. It’s endlessly painful to watch, and Argento’s motivation for telling such a macabre tale is mystifyingly undefined.
The film can be considered a road movie that follows Sarah, the mother, teaching young Jeremiah (Biblical reference explicitly intended) about the evils of the world. How so? Well, her boyfriend rapes him, she introduces him to the magic of drugs and alcohol, and her fanatically religious family leaves the poor child mentally and physically nonplussed. All this sounds like fantastic entertainment, sure, but Argento’s desired end is wholly nebulous. In fact, I’m not entirely sure she has one, other than the conspicuous manipulation found in her many failed attempts to strike a random emotional chord and lyrically suck you into the soulless story. I can see where some would find the alarmingly expressive cinematography enchanting, but I found it distracting and, frankly, meaningless. It’s a series of frame-able images that, had they not been ruined by the shear carelessness of Argento’s storytelling, I may have considered as potential wall decoration.
As for the acting, it’s actually tolerably subtle. The one arena in which there are no theatrics, Argento exhibits the kind of experience that can only be accumulated through watching a master work year after year, and the supporting performers, perhaps with the exception of young Bennett who just hasn’t quite developed the chops necessary to endure excessive torture, are generally watchable. It’s most difficult to say what Argento is attempting to achieve; it is less so to declare it a failure in all regards. There is no hope, no life, and no depth or dimension to the torpidly drawn characters. In fact, I was able to find much more comfort in the go-to cinematic depressant Schindler’s List.
Perhaps her goal is to suggest that some parents shouldn’t be allowed to parent at all. I submit that some filmmakers shouldn’t be allowed to make films at all, and Argento (the younger) is among them.