Crimes of the Heart

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Beth Henley was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her play, “Crimes of the Heart.” A film version of the work was produced in 1986, directed by the Australian film maker, Bruce Beresford. The play is formulaic and derivative: sub-Faulkner Southern Gothic tarted-up with Tennessee Williams’ accents with a little bit of Sam Shepherd yokel absurdity tossed in for a good measure. (Sam Shepherd, limping like Dennis Weaver from “Gunsmoke” and flashing a toothy grin, has a small role as the love-interest of one of the three sisters, unconvincing siblings whose giggling and strangely disaffected dialogue must carry the show.) Everything seems contrived and false and the show is inadvertently racist in an unintentional way -- all the more troubling because the play and its authorim don’t seem to sense the racism implicit in the material. The three sisters laugh uproariously at inappropriate times and this, I suppose, was the feature of the play that disturbed, or fascinated, critics sufficiently for them to bestow the Pulitzer prize on this thing. Briefly, the situation is this: three sisters are waiting for their Granddaddy, (played by an ancient and grey-faced Hurd Hatfield) to die. Predictably, one of the sisters is a man-teasing, peroxide- blonde singer. This unrepentant flirt is played by Jessica Lange -- she is very pretty and looks a little like a young Dolly Parton without the prosthetics. Another sister is a sexually repressed old maid -- this role is played by Diane Keaton who is completely miscast to the point that she is unable to manage a plausible southern accent. (Keaton acts retarded -- she has a sneaky feral way of glancing at the camera; her facial expressions are vaguely simian and impossible to interpret.) Her role is underwritten; she moons around the garden where birds are always chirping in tropical choruses -- Beresford loads the soundtrack with bird songs -- brooding about her one and only love affair. Henley gives Keaton’s character a “shrunken ovary” whatever that is and her inadequate reproductive apparatus is the subject of much discussion in the play. The third sister (Sissy Spacek) has shot her repulsive racist husband after the man has beaten her fifteen-year old African-American lover --Henley’s play shows it’s age with respect to this element of the plot; after all, how would we view the play if the roles were reversed and a forty-year-old white male were depicted in sexual congress (documented by photographs taken by a private eye) with a fifteen-year-old Black girl? In any event, the picture blithely glides past child sexual abuse and statutory rape issues; presumably, the African-American boy couldn’t resist the much older white woman and should count himself lucky that she offered herself to him. In any event, the boy gets beaten, (and, later, is forced to leave town when the token Black character becomes a nuisance to the plot) and the adulterous wife shoots her husband and, then, implausibly makes lemonade for herself and the wounded man who is writhing on the dining room floor. The murderous wife is put in jail but released so that she can romp around and giggle and exchange girlish confidences with her sisters -- presumably she’s out on bail. Everything is completely weightless, a world without meaningful consequences -- we know from the outset that Sissy Spacek’s character will be vindicated in somehowand that no one will come to any harm and, indeed, that the bond between the sisters will be reaffirmed in some bathetic way. At the climax, Spacek’s character tries to imitate the three sisters’ mother who hanged herself and her pet cat at some indeterminate time in the past. Once again, the play and the film lack any sense of gravity or consequence -- the suicide attempts are giddy and played for laughs. The dialogue isn’t sufficiently witty or memorable to impart any meaning to these incidents -- the girls laugh and laugh and, then, they cry some and share confidences and, then, they laugh and laugh some more and we are supposed to laugh with them and feel our hearts warmed by their sisterly affection for one another. But since everything is completely unreal, but without the charm of fantasy, the movie (and the play) is like watching strange insects in a bottle or, ,perhaps, sea monkeys in their tiny aquarium -- it’s sort of cute and vaguely interesting until it ceases to be cute and, instead, is merely dull and annoying.