joem18b
Posts 689
|
7/16/2007 5:34 PM
posted awhile ago
mostly not about the heart, but that other place
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (2004)
Directed by Asia Argento.
Starring Asia Argento, Peter Fonda, Cole Sprouse, Dylan Sprouse, Jimmy Bennett.
98 minutes. Rated R. A mother (prostitute, substance-abuser, stripper, so forth) regains custody of her 7-year-old son, wrenching him from the arms of his loving foster parents. (If I were Knoxville, Tenn., I'd protest the representation of Child Protective Services in this movie.) Road trip ensues, with predictable results: boy sleeps in bathtub; boy doesn't eat nourishing meals; boy does drugs; boy sees mom on the pot; on the couch in undignified poses; doing it in bed with various johns; boy is molested; made to dress in girl's clothing and then re-molested; runs away; is brought back; sees low-budget dream visions, as Argento appears to be carrying some heavy Mediterranean Catholic baggage; interacts with name actors in bit parts; shows some acting chops; so forth. Amy Sidaris was born to play this mom in an over-the-top, campy, tasteless indie. "The Heart is Deceitful" could have been that movie - almost is, in fact, though not on purpose. But here we're stuck with Argento instead of Sidaris From the first shot of Argento I'm asking myself, is he supposed to be the boy's mother for real and he's going to do the whole movie in drag, or is he the boy's transgendered father, or what? Too much lipstick, ridiculous fifties John Waters outfits, male-style fluffy armpits, shaved shanks, vascular hands. My gender speculations last through the whole movie because even after it becomes clear that Asia is going to go all the way as a woman, there are lots of scenes where lowlife guys tell him how beautiful he is and then show him that they mean it, the guy-on-guy action adding texture to the film. When Peter Fonda and Ornella Muti and Jeremy Sisto (Rachel Griffiths' crazy younger brother in Six Feet Under) show up in a flick like this, are they just doing somebody a favor or do they need a little work, or what? Sisto gets to rage and shout for 30 seconds, but then the meth lab blows up. Please tell me that they used a stunt double in burnt-flesh makeup to do the part where he stumbles out of the wreckage, smoldering, and stands in the road with his arms up a la Platoon and then drops to his knees and then keels over onto his face on the pavement. Ouch. Needing a little work is one thing, but dude, this is debasing. (Do meth labs in movies ever not blow up?) Warning: We are teased with interior shots of a totally tricked-out, pimped-up 18-wheeler and Asia might have saved the movie right there by pausing the narrative and taking us all on a detailed tour of the rig. But no. Probably saving it for the sequel. Checking my notes for the moments where I laughed out loud: guy holding cowboy hat over parts before whipping boy unmercifully; gratutious thumb-sucking by mother and son; red rubber crows; West Virginia House of the Lord; Asia Argento, Rome-born scriptwriter, saying "I'll have another, I reckon"; John Robinson's accent; scrubbing "down there" with a big scrub brush; huge pile of potatoes to be peeled; the market that in a later scene becomes a hospital. Things to like: Tennessee locations; a decent rain scene; great tattoos all around; Ornella Muti. After watching the movie, I checked IMDB and discovered to my amazement that Asia Argento is actually a woman. Regarding the title, "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" (Jeremiah 17:9) - better would have been Lamentations 2:11, "Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city." Watch it drunk. IMDB 6.3; Rotten Tomatoes 40%.
|
|
BigJeffLebowski
Posts 17
|
7/18/2007 3:25 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
As far as sex symbols go, few are willing to plumb the depths of depravity as fully and as frequently as Asia Argento. This is significant not only in that it opens her to a world of film roles at which other actress would likely scoff, but also because her magnetism infuses even her most deplorable characters with an intrinsic, unquantifiable duende that makes other characters’ attractions to them a little more explicable. No film I’ve seen of hers demonstrates this more definitively than The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, which she also co-wrote and directed from the faux autobiographical works of JT LeRoy. It is important that the film’s -- and the stories’ -- lack of authenticity be addressed in any critical assessment of the work. Argento begins her film with a close-up of what is presumably her personal copy of “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,” complete with marginalia and annotations. The audience is immediately aware of the artifice of the film; this is an adaptation, it is playacting. Filmmakers such as Godard, Fellini, and Bergman have used similar framing devices to attune their audiences to the inherent lie of the cinema, that what we see as active, moving documents of life are nothing more than manufactured images flickering in the darkness. This can be used to draw attention to the philosophical or thematic aspects of a film, or simply to give the audience a moment of cathartic release, in which they can let go of their breath, sit back in their seats, and assure themselves, Yes, it was only a movie. In The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, it does give the audience a certain leeway; it tells us it’s okay to watch passively, ineffectually, as countless censurable acts occur before us. It’s one thing that we are given this amnesty within the framework of the cinema, but it is still disconcerting when we realize that Argento made her film before it was publicly announced that JT LeRoy was in fact a literary construction, no more a real person than Huckleberry Finn or Kilgore Trout; and that she may very well have made her film under the pretenses of docudrama rather than fiction. Argento plays Sarah, a 23 year old junkie prostitute who has recently reacquired custody of her son Jeremiah (played by Jimmy Bennett at age 7, and by Dylan and Cole Sprouse several years later). The plot of the film -- which is to say the concurrent theme of its loosely assembled, ragged strands of a story -- follows Sarah and her innumerable misguided abuses of maternal authority. Leaving their home with Jeremiah’s belongings in a garbage bag, Sarah jumps from man to man, home to home, town to town, with Jeremiah in tow, occasionally leaving him in a car or at the home of her most recently jilted lover. While Sarah gallivants about, getting her money from hooking and her food from trash cans, Jeremiah is left with a string of surrogate fathers. Most of them are left incognizant in Sarah’s wake; all of them are abusive. Time and time again, we are given glimmers of hope, only to have them extinguished within seconds: one of Sarah’s countless men shows sympathy for the newly orphaned child, before pathetically raping him; another offers him money for a fresh meal in light of his mother’s negligence, only to use the diversion to drive off without Jeremiah or Sarah. One wonders why such an inept and unwilling mother would want a child so badly. Sarah is unnervingly blunt when she insists, “I’m your mother, all right? Can’t say I wanted you. Can’t say I didn’t do a rabbit’s tricks to try an’ get rid of you. If my father’d let me, you’d long been flushed down some toilet, you understand?” What is uniquely disconcerting about the scene -- and about Argento’s delivery, especially -- is that Sarah doesn’t say this with remorse; nor does she say it as a warning. Sarah’s deplorable account of Jeremiah’s unwelcome entry to the world is stated plainly, as a fact, as information meant to give Jeremiah some sense of context. But still, Sarah is prone to inexplicable and incongruous moments of tenderness and affection for her son. And just as shadows are darkest in the brightest light, her failings and transgressions as a mother become doubly afflictive when considered alongside her few maternal moments. Jeremiah, seemingly orphaned for good, bounces around for the next several years, in which we learn: Peter Fonda makes a creepy grandfather, Ben Foster makes a creepy cousin, Winona Ryder makes a creepy counselor, and, well, basically everyone within Jeremiah’s sphere is creepy and, in some way, mentally or morally damaged. Every figure of authority leads Jeremiah into temptation, and then punishes him for succumbing to it. It’s a miracle he functions as well as he does; which is not to say he functions well, mind you, but he doesn’t become a catatonic or a suicide, which given the circumstances, is pretty damn impressive. The most unsettling aspect of the film is that Sarah is, astonishingly, the most constant and reliable force in Jeremiah’s life. For all the distant relatives and the truck stop hookups and jilted husbands and fiancés, Sarah is the one person who always comes back to Jeremiah. Is this why he dabbles in transvestitism? Why he attempts to seduce his mother’s boyfriends? I can assume that’s what Argento is driving at, but she is too concerned with the verisimilitude of her characters’ depravity to do more than hint at -- if not accidentally stumble upon -- that kind of psychological depth. What Argento has crafted is a deeply disquieting film about the vulnerability of youth and the fallibility of icons and idols, be they personal, religious, or other. As a visceral, evocative, and purely demonstrative work, it succeeds at its vocation. What Argento has failed to do, however, is offer any kind of redemption for her characters. It’s no accident that Sarah’s final abduction of Jeremiah seems at once liberating and binding; he is so damaged by his upbringing that perpetuating this debauched cycle may well be the only way he can survive in the world. But what message do we take from this? Such are the unjust ways of the world? How blind and senseless we humans are? This kind of vacant morality worked superlatively in a film like Elephant; but as Gus Van Sant demonstrated when he applied the same technique to Last Days, sometimes it reflects nothing more than an empty nihilism on behalf of the characters and their progenitors.
|
|
TheWorkingDead
Posts 273
|
8/20/2007 11:13 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
 strangeframe: Demndiary:
They should both bear the responsibility of the seven pairs of killers that went on road trip murder sprees copying the film as closely as they could. Violence should be abhored, not glorified. Film is a powerful medium. It should always be treated as such.
I'd like to disagree with that point, actually. I've never been one to agree with the idea that violent media is to blame for violence in real life. Mainly because, when we ALL go through it, can we blame it for what a small percentage does? I play violent video games, watch horror movies almost daily, read a lot of horror novels, and have a soft spot for old school gangsta rap, and yet I've never even been in a fight. My reaction to Natural Born Killers was not to go out and kill someone, and apparently yours wasn't either. Neither was that the reaction of, i'd say, 99.9% percent of the people who saw that film. But why is it, that when someone does go out and snap, we blame the stuff they listened to, watched, or read? I'd like to point you to an interesting, and, yes, researched article that shows that while the outrage over video game violence has increased in recent years, youth violence has been on the downswing. Even with Grand Theft Auto the violence rate among youth declined, making this the safest time for children since the 70s. Follow the link here. I'd also like to paraphrase one of the better points in the article, by saying that it violence in film(and video games) doesn't create violence in real life, but that violent people are drawn to violent content.
|
|
TheWorkingDead
Posts 273
|
8/21/2007 9:05 AM
posted awhile ago
Re: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
I understand that the discussion wasn't about videogames, and I'm kinda sorry I dragged it there. However, here's a link to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, where the large assortment of graphs all point to one thing: since the early to mid nineties crime, violent crime in general, has been on a steady downward slope. All while arrests and convictions have risen slightly. The result being that arrests have gone up, reporting of crimes has gone up, but the overall number of violent crimes being commited has in fact shrunk. The only area where this doesn't appear to hold true is drug related crimes(usage or selling). I tried to post the image, but I can't get it to work, so here's a recap for people who don't feel like following the link. Total violent crime in 2003(thats the most recent the BOJ has up) is down from the high of 2003 which was over 4 million violent crimes commited, to a 30 year low of under 2 million. At the same time, reporting of these crimes has gone from under 1 million in 1973 to just over 1 million. So, if your looking at arrests only, like your last statistic was, the numbers are a bit skewed. My reasons for bringing videogames into this were basically to show that the media, and reactionary politicians, always like to hype whatever offends them at the time, latching onto this whenever there is a school shooting(which is horribly opportunistic and sad), when the problem isn't nearly as bad as everyone imagines it. I'm not saying violence in this country isn't a problem, I'm just saying the fearmongering and finger pointing isn't helping, and may be hurting it. Are you suggesting that we are in the Iraq war because of violent video games and movies? What about oil? What about our repeated interests in that area of the world? Are you saying George Bush(both of them) and his advisors sat around watching Natural Born Killers until they couldn't stands it no more and had to invade another country to appease the bloodlust? We, the American people, are in the Iraq war not because of movies, but because of underreporting of the facts. If thats what you want to blame the media for. Blame the news, or more appropriately the white house, for not giving all of the facts to begin with. There's a difference between that and violent movies like Saw or Hostel. If the media is so influential, why are we still in the war after the release of so many movies showing it as an 'unjust' war, such as Faranheit 9/11 or No End In Sight? Also, you claim that I must be in the minority of educated americans, which shows quite a lack of faith in humanity. I still don't agree with this idea that only the educated few can handle and understand violence in film. To use Natural Born Killers as an example once again, the IMDB lists the American gross on that movie at 50,282,766, and then of course more for rentals. Are you implying that the vast majority of those people went on violent crime sprees? I don't buy it. Sorry to keep getting off topic on this discussion about The Heart is Deceitful.... if anyone is annoyed just let us know, and I'll stop.
|
|