Where the Heart Is

It’s been a few years since I last watched this¹, and I’m probably in a very small club of people who have seen it twice. It’s my wife’s favourite film though so here we are again.

I urge you to go back and read the previous review, because there is too much to talk about here. It really is a mad film that takes on way too many story lines. There’s a kidnapping, a tornado, child molesting, a train accident etc etc

What I forgot to mention was that Novalee’s boyfriend Willy Jack Pickens, early on in the film, pays a girl for a handjob who then turns out to be 14. I guess he does end up in jail but the severity of the crime is skipped over.

This film also has the poorest grip on the passage of time I think I’ve ever seen. There are just hard cuts with gaps of six months between them, and you don’t find out that the time has gone by until much later, or often never and you are simply left guessing whether it’s days or years that have passed.

Sometimes someone will get on the phone and say something like “it’s been 2 months now since I saw you” but you could swear it’d only been 2 days. We were wondering if it was some sort of Christopher Nolan experimental shit but that seems doubtful given the rest of the film.

Again I will re-state that the cast here is weirdly good. Natalie Portman, Ashley Judd, Stockard Channing, Joan Cusack, Keith David. There are no bad performances to speak of. Even Sally Field shows up for one scene. Something surely went wrong for it to come out this weird.