The anxious question beforehand was whether or not the alleged autobiographical origins would produce something a little more firsthand and free of formula than Robert Benton had given us in the past, something a little more detailed and individual, more expansive and at ease. Or to move a step nearer the nub: whether or not the inherent truthfulness of the material would lessen that string-pulling urge that had carried all through Benton's movies, from his not too bad worst (The Late Show or Still of the Night) to his not very much better best (Kramer vs. Kramer). The answer, in a few short words, is en o tee. The setting and period -- Waxahachie, Texas, in the mid-Thirties -- take Benton back to his roots; but the lack of deviation from or embellishment of the commonplace (the tornado, the harvest-time race for prize money, the inevitable arrival of the Ku Klux Klan, but not so soon as to spoil the race) would tend to argue against the personal intimacy which is supposed to be Benton's trump card; or in other words, is supposed to justify the Heart in the title. And in an odd way, this ostensibly modest and small-scale movie has as bad a case of monumentalism (the worse for its insidiousness) as any movie of its time. Not content to tell a story of rural Southern Depression, it seems determined to tell the story of rural Southern Depression. Much of the bloatedness of modern movies can be summed up in the drift from a to the. With Sally Field, Lindsay Crouse, Amy Madigan, Ed Harris, Danny Glover, and John Malkovich. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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