Warning: This review contains a major spoiler, so if you don’t want to know what happens in the last ten minutes turns out, turn back now.
I actually enjoyed The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for most of the movie. It had the right mix of quirky and earnest to suit my tastes. It’s the story of a deaf man (Alan Arkin, below) who is waiting to gain legal guardianship of another deaf man who is also mentally challenged and committed to a mental hospital.
While he waits for permission to remove his friend from the hospital, we follow him as he gets acquainted with the town he’s moved to. We meet a middle aged couple dealing with financial hardship, a teenage girl afraid to dream, a drunken drifter, a black doctor looking back on a lifetime of choices, and the doctor’s daughter, who has a tenuous relationship with her father.
The film has a great cast, including Cicily Tyson, Stacy Keach, and Sondra Locke. I even recognized the second deaf man as Tinker Jones from the first season of Little House on the Prairie 1, so that was cool. Even with this cast, though, I don’t think The Heart is a Lonely Hunter lived up to its potential.
click image to enlarge
Maybe it was the change of era from the book’s 1930s to the late 1960s. The financial problems would have been a lot more potent set against the Great Depression. Other parts of the story would have made more sense in the original setting, too. The institutionalized racism shown in the doctor’s subplot were interesting and germane to the times, but I wonder if his story would have benefited from being set before the Civil Rights movement.
There were also problems with the direction. It had that late 1960s loosey-goosey ‘that’s good enough’ feel to it. It reminded me of the direction in Sybil, though in that case the failure wasn’t fatal. Here, I just kept wondering if they couldn’t have given each scene one more shot.
But the biggest problem I had with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was in the last ten minutes. It’s going along, and going along, and a bunch of disconnected things are happening, and I’m waiting for all the storylines to join into one, and hey isn’t that drifter going to return soon, and then Alan Arkin kills himself and the end. Muh-wha? Excuse me?
I just about threw the remote at the TV.
If I were handing out opinions about what film you should see (which, come to think of it, I am!), I’d skip The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Maybe see it for Alan Arkin, because he’s truly wonderful in the role. And the doctor’s story is kind of poignant. Otherwise, it’s a pass.
1 And yes, I remembered the character’s name without looking it up. Such is my love for the first season of Little House. ⇧
(Thanks to DVD Beaver for today’s screencap.)
