Great review of the film
http://sfbaytimes.com/?sec=article&article_id=3584_
Harrowing and Beautiful: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
By Don Baird
Published: February 10, 2005
Last Thursday, thanks to the accommodating and friendly organizers honoring my last minute request, I attended the opening night of the San Francisco Indie Film Festival, featuring the premiere of the anxiously awaited film adaptation of JT Leroy’s book, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. Directed by and starring Asia Argento, this film was a long time coming and highly anticipated. Like anyone who has read Leroy’s exquisitely executed and highly personal novel—based on his life as a child with his unstable, abusive, tortured and cruel yet enigmatic and larger than life mother, Sarah—I was very intrigued with how someone would effectively bring this harrowing tale to the screen. JT’s writing is so utterly perfect, concise, effective and beautiful, it resonates with strength and a sense of finality, like the last word; a complete vision. Like the writings of certain other literary figures, his words are very potent and complete. They produce images in one’s mind that are so vivid, sensitive and magical, it would almost be wrong to try to translate or recreate them in another medium, like messing with the Holy Grail or something. For some filmmakers, perhaps that challenge is the very reason to attempt bringing an incredible literary work to the screen. Quite often the attempts to do so fall short of people’s expectations, from the writer all the way down to everyone who read, loved and envisioned a movie in their head while reading it. Asia Argento, in her second directorial effort, seems somewhat driven by this inherent challenge of bringing JT’s difficult story to the screen, but the real force behind this film seems to be a genuine admiration and respect and love for this resilient child who lived through this surreal nightmare-ish world. From it he created his own salvation, a raw unyielding talent that places him firmly among the finest literary contemporaries of our time. Argento’s work never panders to the weight of the collected expectations; instead, she concerned herself with the expectations of just one person, the author. Her singular sustained focus has produced a thoroughly intense and believable adaptation, one that couldn’t have been handled better or more effectively by any number of Hollywood heavyweights. Asia’s father Dario Argento, a prolific Italian director of numerous horror films as well as collaborations with directors Sergio Leone and George Romero, saw the film and told her it was a masterpiece, the kind of film you will only make once in your lifetime.
There was so much greatness in this movie it’s kind of hard to break it all down. I was amazed with the intense focus on visual detail—the scenery, the sets and furnishings, the clothes and cars; the truck stops, the extras and smaller roles; the grime and dust and broken down conditions of the various habitats Sarah and Jeremiah float through. From the remote country home with a coal fueled meth lab in the basement to the tacky cabs of another 18-wheeler driven by “your new daddy,” to the trashed cheap hotel rooms or the filthy hovel of a cowboy bachelor, or the stark unadorned bleakness of Jeremiah’s grandparents and their oppressive perverse devotion to the Lord and cleanliness. All of these points contribute so much to the films overall effectiveness and sense of genuine atmosphere.
The three child actors who portray the young Jeremiah—the first one Jimmy Bennet, then the older Jeremiah role shared by Dylan and Cole Sprouse—turned out unforgettable performances. When considering the intense content of the film, I had to think that a lot of those show-biz parents might not want their little ones playing such advanced parts—to have to understand and play accordingly in and around events like prostitution and cross-dressing, child-rape and abuse. I’m glad these parents understood and agreed. I also learned that due to certain delays during the filming, Asia had a lot of extra time to work with the children, proving so successful with their performances that she was subsequently hired to coach one of them on the set of his next film, a mainstream comedy with a major name actor.
As for her portrayal of Sarah, I thought she was mesmerizing. Her gravel-ly hoarse voice and reckless riveting sexuality, the blind determination to get custody of her son only to remind him constantly that he ruins everything for her, neglecting him to extremes, telling him to say he was her brother or even sister, telling him he should have been a girl then making him up like one while she drawls, “that nose is proof that someone in the family fucked a slave,” as she covers his freckles with base. The moments of warmth or any sense of closeness were believable but expressed in a drugged haze, punctuated by severe acts of mental abuse from out of the blue, like telling him his foster parents never wanted to see him again or leaving him alone with her jilted lover who rapes and abandons him in a car under a bridge. She portrayed Sarah with whip-fast mood swings as well as cautionary fantasies and manipulations that were certainly symptomatic of a bipolar condition almost undoubtedly triggered by years of abuse as a child herself. An occasional snippet of dialogue would randomly indicate this before she snapped into another facet of behavior or threw a new wig on and was off to turn a trick. It had to be a tough role to play and her performance was dark and furious, illuminated with fleeting incandescent moments of beauty.
Though the story is replete with shocking acts of violence and sexual abuse, most of the harshest acts were not ever depicted graphically but rather implied in extraordinary flourishes of surreal dream sequences. Some of them perfectly matched the dreams described in the book, like Jeremiah walking in the desert, when suddenly his arms fall off and red crows attack him and start pulling him apart, flying off with his entrails. Their feathers are shown floating around the hospital room as they stitch him up after finding him in the abandoned car. The sound engineering throughout the film was another point that tightened and accentuated a very cohesive and ambitious cinematic work that I’m almost certain will see a broad, well-deserved release and distribution in the near future. When the lights came up afterwards the only thing I could think to say about it was it was far better than I could have imagined and I bet JT is very pleased.
Harrowing and Beautiful: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
By Don Baird
Published: February 10, 2005
Last Thursday, thanks to the accommodating and friendly organizers honoring my last minute request, I attended the opening night of the San Francisco Indie Film Festival, featuring the premiere of the anxiously awaited film adaptation of JT Leroy’s book, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. Directed by and starring Asia Argento, this film was a long time coming and highly anticipated. Like anyone who has read Leroy’s exquisitely executed and highly personal novel—based on his life as a child with his unstable, abusive, tortured and cruel yet enigmatic and larger than life mother, Sarah—I was very intrigued with how someone would effectively bring this harrowing tale to the screen. JT’s writing is so utterly perfect, concise, effective and beautiful, it resonates with strength and a sense of finality, like the last word; a complete vision. Like the writings of certain other literary figures, his words are very potent and complete. They produce images in one’s mind that are so vivid, sensitive and magical, it would almost be wrong to try to translate or recreate them in another medium, like messing with the Holy Grail or something. For some filmmakers, perhaps that challenge is the very reason to attempt bringing an incredible literary work to the screen. Quite often the attempts to do so fall short of people’s expectations, from the writer all the way down to everyone who read, loved and envisioned a movie in their head while reading it. Asia Argento, in her second directorial effort, seems somewhat driven by this inherent challenge of bringing JT’s difficult story to the screen, but the real force behind this film seems to be a genuine admiration and respect and love for this resilient child who lived through this surreal nightmare-ish world. From it he created his own salvation, a raw unyielding talent that places him firmly among the finest literary contemporaries of our time. Argento’s work never panders to the weight of the collected expectations; instead, she concerned herself with the expectations of just one person, the author. Her singular sustained focus has produced a thoroughly intense and believable adaptation, one that couldn’t have been handled better or more effectively by any number of Hollywood heavyweights. Asia’s father Dario Argento, a prolific Italian director of numerous horror films as well as collaborations with directors Sergio Leone and George Romero, saw the film and told her it was a masterpiece, the kind of film you will only make once in your lifetime.
There was so much greatness in this movie it’s kind of hard to break it all down. I was amazed with the intense focus on visual detail—the scenery, the sets and furnishings, the clothes and cars; the truck stops, the extras and smaller roles; the grime and dust and broken down conditions of the various habitats Sarah and Jeremiah float through. From the remote country home with a coal fueled meth lab in the basement to the tacky cabs of another 18-wheeler driven by “your new daddy,” to the trashed cheap hotel rooms or the filthy hovel of a cowboy bachelor, or the stark unadorned bleakness of Jeremiah’s grandparents and their oppressive perverse devotion to the Lord and cleanliness. All of these points contribute so much to the films overall effectiveness and sense of genuine atmosphere.
The three child actors who portray the young Jeremiah—the first one Jimmy Bennet, then the older Jeremiah role shared by Dylan and Cole Sprouse—turned out unforgettable performances. When considering the intense content of the film, I had to think that a lot of those show-biz parents might not want their little ones playing such advanced parts—to have to understand and play accordingly in and around events like prostitution and cross-dressing, child-rape and abuse. I’m glad these parents understood and agreed. I also learned that due to certain delays during the filming, Asia had a lot of extra time to work with the children, proving so successful with their performances that she was subsequently hired to coach one of them on the set of his next film, a mainstream comedy with a major name actor.
As for her portrayal of Sarah, I thought she was mesmerizing. Her gravel-ly hoarse voice and reckless riveting sexuality, the blind determination to get custody of her son only to remind him constantly that he ruins everything for her, neglecting him to extremes, telling him to say he was her brother or even sister, telling him he should have been a girl then making him up like one while she drawls, “that nose is proof that someone in the family fucked a slave,” as she covers his freckles with base. The moments of warmth or any sense of closeness were believable but expressed in a drugged haze, punctuated by severe acts of mental abuse from out of the blue, like telling him his foster parents never wanted to see him again or leaving him alone with her jilted lover who rapes and abandons him in a car under a bridge. She portrayed Sarah with whip-fast mood swings as well as cautionary fantasies and manipulations that were certainly symptomatic of a bipolar condition almost undoubtedly triggered by years of abuse as a child herself. An occasional snippet of dialogue would randomly indicate this before she snapped into another facet of behavior or threw a new wig on and was off to turn a trick. It had to be a tough role to play and her performance was dark and furious, illuminated with fleeting incandescent moments of beauty.
Though the story is replete with shocking acts of violence and sexual abuse, most of the harshest acts were not ever depicted graphically but rather implied in extraordinary flourishes of surreal dream sequences. Some of them perfectly matched the dreams described in the book, like Jeremiah walking in the desert, when suddenly his arms fall off and red crows attack him and start pulling him apart, flying off with his entrails. Their feathers are shown floating around the hospital room as they stitch him up after finding him in the abandoned car. The sound engineering throughout the film was another point that tightened and accentuated a very cohesive and ambitious cinematic work that I’m almost certain will see a broad, well-deserved release and distribution in the near future. When the lights came up afterwards the only thing I could think to say about it was it was far better than I could have imagined and I bet JT is very pleased.
posted by JT LeRoy at 12:21 PM
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