OVP: Crimes of the Heart (1986)

Film: Crimes of the Heart (1986)

Stars: Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, Sam Shepard, Tess Harper, Hurd Hatfield

Director: Bruce Beresford

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Actress-Sissy Spacek, Supporting Actress-Tess Harper, Adapted Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

The 1980's are a weird time for me cinematically.  I was alive in the 1980's, but the movies I was obsessed with were Lady and the Tramp and Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day...I was not really concerned with the kinds of films that Oscar was acknowledging.  As a result, I don't have any nostalgia to surround myself with from the decade, and am left with kind of a bad feeling every time someone brings it up with reverence...as the 1980's is easily my least favorite decade cinematically.  The acting is a bit too involved, the headliners are not my favorites, the scripts are too indulgent and anguished...it was a decade where people seemed to be totally oblivious to how awful Ronald Reagan was as president.  I had this sense of apprehension heading into Crimes of the Heart, even though I genuinely like all three of the leading ladies in it (even with my 1980's allergy), as I was curious what a film like this would feel like, and if it would rise above the 1980's trappings.  What I didn't expect, however, was how weird it would be.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about three sisters, all of whom have very different natures.  Lenny (Keaton), is a spinster who has spent much of their life taking care of their dying grandfather (Hatfield), while Meg (Lange) is a struggling singer in Hollywood who has left behind her family.  They are both home immediately following Babe (Spacek), their youngest sister, having had an affair with a black teenager & shooting her husband who regularly beats her senseless.  As the film progresses, we learn more about the trio, specifically the shocking trauma they endured when they were children (that their mother hanged herself and her cat, making them national news).  As the film ends, it looks like Babe will kill herself in a fashion similar to her mother, but is unsuccessful in repeated attempts to commit suicide, and the film ends with the three sisters finally acknowledging their need for one another, despite their differences.

The movie is bizarre not in its approach (it actually kind of works for a theatrical adaptation, even if you can see the strings of it being a play from a mile away), but in its strange tonal inconsistencies.  It is a tender film, one about three sisters who love each other despite deep differences & genuine animosities. But it also runs rampant between comedy-and-drama, oftentimes in ways that you can't really tell what the director is trying to accomplish.  The cat hanging comes as a total surprise during a felt scene, and while it is a spit-take moment, it also feels kind of cheap.  There's something to be said for telling the story of people who endure 15 minutes of fame in the lens of comic tragedy (we've all seen headlines like that "Woman Hangs Self & Cat" feels ripped from the back pages of a tabloid newspaper), but the movie itself never successfully lands on what its purpose is, and when it tries to turn Babe's suicide into an equally comic moment (after seeing what it did to these women as children)...I just didn't like it.  It felt like a parody, and not in a good way.

The film won three Oscar nominations.  As I mentioned, the stage-to-screen translation is good even if you can tell its a play, but weirdly that can be accredited to the art directors.  I loved the lived-in sense of Lenny's house, the way it is bursting with too much stuff, quilts & photo albums & boxes that you've "meant to throw out but have been collecting dust for twenty years."  So often in films we don't see this attention-to-detail, but it's very real-look at your house, and notice things that have sat on counters or on closet shelves for a decade without having been moved in all that time.  Adding this sort of personality makes it feel less like a stage.  The script, though, doesn't do that kind of legwork, and its issues with tone & strange shock value felt off-putting.

Sissy Spacek is the best member of the cast, by a lot in my estimation, even if she also gets the best part.  Keaton is the pro at comedy, but has never done well with films that tread across genres (she's a good dramatic actress, but she needs to play that drama completely straight otherwise it comes off sarcastic), but it's Spacek who best encapsulates the black humor of the film.  She plays her part as someone who lives a more spontaneous life than her sister Lenny, but one more sporadic than her sister Meg, and she's very good when she's pitting her two older sisters against one another (as if she's done it her whole life).  The nomination for Tess Harper is weird.  Harper had just had a breakout part three years earlier for Tender Mercies, but that hardly explains her shrill, blink-and-you'll-miss-it role in Crimes of the Heart, a totally one-note performance that lacks any of the nuance that Spacek is bringing.  It's honestly bad acting, and totally runs aground the rest of the picture.  It's hard to imagine Oscar couldn't have done better.