A Search for Connections

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

PLACES IN THE HEART Directed and Written by Robert Benton

Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?

--E.C. Bentley, Trent's Last Case

How indeed? Take the new film in which this question--the opening sentence of a classic murder mystery--is quoted three times. What seems to matter to most people when it comes to judging a movie is simple: "What's it about?" and "Who's in it?" By these standards Places in the Heart is going to appear, at first glance, a bit out of time and place. In outline, the story is inescapably reminiscent of a sentimental silent film or of 19th century theatrical melodrama, telling as it does the simple tale of a plucky Texas widow attempting to save her farm from foreclosure and her family from being broken up should the old homestead go. Indeed, Edna Spalding, as luminously portrayed by Sally Field, is as good as she is brave: churchly, compassionate, guileless. Her sense of social responsibility is informed by unimpeachable instinct, not by suspect ideology.

Nor is that the end of this picture's celebration of the traditional American verities. Struggling on against the ravages of the Great Depression, the elements (a devastating tornado) and the wickedness of the unenlightened (a hypocritical banker, a crooked cotton merchant, even the Ku Klux Klan), Edna is comforted and aided by her two utterly winning children (Yankton Hatten and Gennie James), by a shrewd, gentle, black man (Danny Glover) whom she redeems from rootlessness and petty crime, and by a blind man (John Malkovich) whom she redeems from bitterness. As these archetypes of disenfranchisement assemble in her kitchen, a bonding of proletarian fiction and gaslit theater takes place. And a wary customer may be forgiven for wondering if the shades of D.W. Griffith and John Steinbeck are warring for possession of Writer-Director Robert Benton's soul.

It is precisely here that one should wrench his attention away from what traditionally seems to matter in considering a movie and focus it on what truly matters. "Yes--oh, dear, yes--the novel tells a story," E.M. Forster once announced in a self-described "drooping regretful voice," and it is the same, only more so, with movies. Having provided richly for this simple need, Benton is free to turn to what really interests him: the quality of the lives that people lead between the plotlines, their sense of the world and of their connections with it. In particular, his business is to evoke, and thus rescue from the onrush of history, the way things were for him when he was a boy growing up in the small town of Waxahachie, Texas, in the 1930s, to get down on film "a sense of being in a place and part of a place that goes back further than anyone you know." He adds, "Those feelings used to be deeply present for a lot of people, but ... people these days move so much that the ties, the connections, can't take hold."

For Benton, 51, who wrote and directed Kramer vs. Kramer among other films, evocation is not quite autobiography. The events in Edna Spalding's life, for instance, may be based on what happened to his great-grandmother, but her character contains aspects of his mother, his wife and, as he has carefully pointed out, some of Sally Field's background. The same is true of Glover's Moze, who developed out of a black man who worked for Benton's family, but whose magnetic presence is a tribute to the performer. Similarly, Malkovich's blind boarder, imposed on Edna's household by the smarmy banker. He is based on a granduncle of Benton's, who indeed had a recording for the blind of Trent's Last Case, which the director was forbidden to touch when he was a child. But the edgy precision of Malkovich's manner, the very cock of his head as he listens for clues to the reality he cannot see, are the contributions of another fine actor.

It is, in fact, from details like this, hundreds of them, passing before the subtly shaded and disciplined lens of Cinematographer Nestor Almendros' camera, an eye that never wanders toward pure realism or toward sentimentality either, that Places in the Heart derives much of its strength. The dust rising from the wheels of a hurrying flivver, the chilly darkness of a cavernous bank, the way the early morning sun strikes a field of cotton, and the camera's simple crane up to reveal the immensity of the field and of the task before the little band of pickers toiling in it are palpable. Ultimately, it is the play of light more than the play of actors and of words that imparts to movies like this both their singularity and their capacity to strike off, without seeming to try, resonant, universalizing visual metaphors. Confessing that he leaves framing and composition to Almendros, Benton calls him, simply, a great artist.

But with this film Benton, were he less modest and softspoken, could begin to advance a similar claim for himself. His script, honed from a 250-page first draft, is as sparing with words as it is rich in emotion. And some of the film's crucial moments are entirely free of meaningful dialogue. There is no better realization anywhere of a small town's sense of community than in the way Benton groups its citizens, first at a wake, then at a dance. At another moment, a pair of guilty lovers (Ed Harris and Amy Madigan), emblematic of the dissatisfactions that dare not speak their name in all the earth's Waxahachies, betray themselves to his wife (Lindsay Grouse) by the way they handle a deck of cards in a rummy game. Best of all is the Communion service that climaxes the movie, where, with amazing grace, Benton moves almost imperceptibly from reality to fantasy in order to find for his people the kind of reconciliation with their fates that he sought for himself by making this film.

By curious coincidence, Places in the Heart is one of three major American films this fall that revolve around hard-pressed families fighting the elements and a wayward economy to save their farms. The others, Country and The River, are in their ways distinctive films. But neither is informed by Benton's compulsion to sort out what matters from what merely seems to matter in a living memory's core. It is the patient care with which he addressed that problem, and the example he obviously set for his colleagues, that will permit his film to find its place in many a heart this season. --By Richard Schickel. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Elaine Dutka