The Set-Up: Unfortunately, what most people know Places in the Heart for is Sally Field's second (and very deserved) win of the Oscar for Best Actress in 1984, and her blurted exposition of "I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!" in her acceptance speech. It takes away slightly from the terrific movie that Robert Benton shaped from the wheat and chaff of his boyhood days in Depression-era Texas, and that Field holds together as its center.The movie begins with the fracturing of a family and a community—the town's Sheriff, Edna's husband is killed, horrifically and accidentally, when a town kid, drunk and randomly discharging a firearm, squeezes the trigger when the gun is pointing at him. Subsequently, the boy is lynched by town-folk, his body presented to Edna in a perverse show of community support and "justice."
Nothing is the same. Events, natural and unnatural, whirl to throw hurdles at the family and the community's existence, and the story ends at a town gathering place—church—where everyone comes together and Benton ties the story up in a neat bow.
The film ends with one of the most startling (and, for me, haunting) expressions of life, death, Love and Faith. At the communion breaking of bread and drinking of wine, the camera pans along the celebrants in a kind of roll-call of characters, and if one is paying close attention, one notices that the church-pews might be a bit more crowded than they were in the preceding long-shots of the church interior. But, it isn't until the the shot reaches the character of Moze, sitting and communing in the segregated church.
"What's Moze doing there?" We'd just seen Danny Glover's character leave the farm for good, so what's he doing in the Church? Did he come back? Obviously, there's a scene missing, where...etc.
It's troubling. Troubling enough that you might gloss over the fact that John Malkovich's character, who doesn't seem particularly religious, is sitting with the Spaldings. We pause at Edna, and at that point, the film pivots and turns in the direction of the surreal...and of faith. Sitting next to Edna is her slain husband, Sheriff Royce Spalding, killed at the very beginning of the movie and whose death shapes the events that make the movie, who takes the sacrificial wine, the blood of Christ, and hands it to Wylie, the young man who mistakenly killed him, and was subsequently lynched by the mob of Waxahachie men-folk.
We don't see Moze or Royce or Wylie in the long shot; they are not there and are either dead or missing in action. But, as the scriptures says, love never ends, and their presence is there, their spirit, their place in the community.
And in the heart.
The Story: "What's going to happen to us?"
Waxahachie, Texas, 1935. The death of her husband forces Edna Spalding (Sally Field) to seek other forms of income to keep her family in their home. She hires a share-cropper (Danny Glover) to oversee the planting of cotton in her field, hoping to win the bonus for bringing in the first crop. She rents a room to the blind brother-in-law (John Malkovich) of the town's banker who holds her home's mortgage. Events splinter some and galvanize others, and as school teacher Viola Kelesey and her husband (Amy Madigan, Terry O'Quinn) leave for Houston and a new life, the church they pass hold Edna and her household, as well as Margaret Lomax (Lindsay Crouse) and her husband Wayne (Ed Harris)—with whom Viola was having an affair, and affair that Margaret has only recently discovered.
Action!
PREACHER: "On the night before his crucifixion"
PREACHER: "Our Lord gathered with his disciples"
PREACHER: "He broke the bread and blessed it."
COMMUNICANT: The Peace of God...
FRANK SPALDING: The Peace of God.
SHERIFF ROYCE SPALDING: The Peace of God.
Places in the Heart
Words by Robert Benton
Pictures by Nestor Almendros and Robert Benton
Places in the Heart is available on DVD from Sony Home Entertainment.
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