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Whose cheatin' Heart? A fable of our era leaps — or hobbles — from page to screen By Stephen Beachy› a&eletters@sfbg.com Asia Argento's The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things is the preposterous story, once widely imagined to be true, of the childhood of Jeremiah "JT" LeRoy, as he bounces between the custody of his foster parents, his prostitute mother, and his sadistic, fundamentalist grandparents. Now that we've been divested of the cherished illusion that JT was a homeless, HIV-positive child prostitute, we are free to watch Heart not as poignant and painfully honest autobiography but as what the story always has been: a punk-inflected fantasy about "white trash." We can finally concede that the character of JT's mother Sarah, as played by Argento herself, bears no resemblance to anyone you might actually meet at a West Virginia truck stop, but only to the fictive characters on which she'd always been based, characters in other films played by the likes of Laura Dern, Juliette Lewis, and Reese Witherspoon. Although Jimmy Bennett, who plays the seven-year-old JT, is a fine little actor, bringing an appropriate confusion and blankness to the role, he has the unhappy task of acting alongside Heart's director, who seems always to have wandered in from a radically different movie. While we're accustomed to suspending our disbelief in the face of, say, white trash child-beaters with Hollywood abs, or country-and-western truck drivers with Hollywood tattoos, it is impossible to watch Argento without remembering that we are watching Argento. With that amazing face, she could be a Pasolini character, or the type of dame traditionally played by Anna Magnani, an Italian immigrant stuck in a bad American marriage. In her attempt to channel Courtney Love, she also seems to be approaching, but never quite arriving at, the outrageous camp of early John Waters. She'd play well next to Edith Massey or Divine, certainly. The primary pleasure of this film is watching the obvious relish Argento takes in doing endless varieties of white trash drag. By the middle of the film, however, when we've tired of guessing what floozy outfit she will show up in next, it would be nice to have some sense of the troubled tenderness of this mother-child bond. There is little narrative tension in the film, which treats much of Jeremiah's childhood like a punk rock acid flashback, a technique that doesn't serve to create the mental landscape of the boy himself. The film relies on Sonic Youth instead of its actors to create its emotional tone. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon's anger and dread are appropriately apocalyptic but don't fill in the blankness of the older JT, played by twins Cole and Dylan Sprouse. Beyond casting twins to play a fragmented child, Argento has one other inspired conceit: hiring herself as the young Jeremiah for the scene in which he seduces his mother's boyfriend. This technique both conveys the complex identity issues that form the only interesting context for the film and saves the story from veering into the realm of kiddie porn, where it always seems poised to go. Argento is not the first director to send her white trash protagonists adrift in a hallucinogenic fun house. Thankfully less ambitious than Oliver Stone in her attempts at social commentary and less silly and deep than David Lynch in her attempts to create an American gothic landscape as dreamworld underbelly, she also has considerably less sense of forward drive. Watching children get abused (and waiting for the next scene of abuse) is a narrative pleasure only for sadists and is illuminating only if we discover a trajectory, no matter how deluded the causality. In Marnie, Tippi Hedren's childhood encounters with her mother's promiscuity contribute to her adult career as a kleptomaniac. In Sybil the abuse is the answer to the mystery of what dark secrets lie at the heart of the fragmented personality and its missing chunks of time. The message that child abuse isn't necessarily interesting or meaningful is probably a valuable one, but as a concept it can't carry the film any more than the brief cameos by Peter Fonda as the evil fundamentalist grandpa, Marilyn Manson as one of Sarah's polymorphously perverse boyfriends, or the surprise appearance of the convicted shoplifter movie star who once claimed the earliest JT sighting ever — at the opera back in the early '90s. Seeing Winona Ryder onscreen, however briefly, does serve as a reminder that this movie needn't be viewed as the mental landscape of any young boy at all. The real stars of this film are the emotionally overwrought mental landscapes of the not-so–white trash women who dreamed it up: Argento and Laura Albert. Of Argento, the publicity materials inform us that "Her personal connection to the material ran deep, her tormented relationship with her father [Dario Argento] being one of the reasons the novel struck a nerve in her, and she decided to adapt, direct and star in the film herself." By placing herself in a horror film in which she is both the monster and one of the victims, she allows us to imagine she is working out her issues with the horror auteur who started her acting career and who was fond of filming his daughter being terrorized and raped. As for the mental landscape of Albert, the woman who spent thousands of hours on the telephone (1994 to today) pretending to be an abused and suicidal child, the film does accurately convey a nostalgia-laced vision of exactly the sort of descent into hell (drugs and sex work and skanky punk boyfriends with meth labs) that we could expect from a middle-class girl from Brooklyn who spent time on the streets working out her own issues with her absent father and wacky theater-critic mother. Why, exactly, the mommy and daddy issues of these two women have been projected, once again, onto characters from a completely different socioeconomic context is a mystery. Is the relentless belting and molesting and bathing children in lye that supposedly goes on in those West Virginia hills really that much more interesting than Argento's and Albert's childhoods? If not a mystery, it's at least one of our issues, as an entire culture, in need of some serious processing. * THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS Fri/24–Thurs/30 Castro Theatre 429 Castro, SF $6–$9 (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com See Rep Clock for showtimes. |
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