Sometimes, a person just has to throw logic, reason, and good sense out the window and speak straight from the gut. Give in to that rabid emotion, without having to feel justified to mount an airtight defense. Pure, visceral loathing, without any fancy rhetoric to smooth away the rough edges. So here goes: Fuck this movie. Fuck it up, fuck it down, fuck it sideways. Ban it. Make it illegal. A felony simply for mentioning it in public. Or private. In my 52 years of crawling and gurgling on this planet, I can’t remember having a less enjoyable time than the 105 torture-filled minutes of Crimes of the Heart.
Maybe I’ve seen worse – most assuredly so – but for the purposes of how I feel right this very minute in the immediate aftermath of this crime against humanity, I want to exclaim from various rooftops that there would be no more horrendous way to spend an evening. I plotted my escape no less than three dozen times, but I knew what had to be done. If I was going to complete my obsessive quest to see every single movie nominated for an Academy Award (major categories only), I had to put in my time. The things I do to avoid entering a mental institution.
The nominations for Sissy Spacek (Best Actress) and Tess Harper (Best Supporting Actress) are inexplicable enough, but to learn that this slapdash, magnolia-scented monstrosity also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1981? Were there no other offerings that year? Had author Beth Henley fellated every last member of the selection committee, promising anal if they made it unanimous? I knew the venerated award had fallen on hard times in recent years due to the usual histrionics from the inclusivity obsessed, but 1981? Had we lost our ever-loving minds as far back as that? Given Reagan’s election the year before, the question pretty much answers itself.
I mean, this was a prize given to Eugene O’Neill and August Wilson. And what about Thornton Wilder? Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller also stopped by for a visit. Now, amongst that august company, a dopey dimwit from Jackson, Mississippi who somehow convinced the world that the unending cackling of Southern fried hens with a collective IQ of 40 constituted serious drama. By all means, let’s bring it to the big screen. Give it to Bruce Beresford. Since when did he give a damn about quality?
The story? Sure, why not. Spacek is Babe (you won’t forget, because her name is uttered no less than 34,000 times in the course of the movie). Seems she’s shot her husband for no good reason and…..no, before I move on, back to the Babe thing. What is it with movies and plays where folks say each other’s names over and over and over and over, even if they’re the only two people in the room? If I’m six inches from someone’s face, why am I screaming their name? Don’t they fucking know who I’m talking to? Christ Almighty, I’ve lived with people for years at a stretch and never said their name out loud once. Because I’m not fucking insane.
This happened so often, for no apparent reason, that I couldn’t think of anything else for a good hour. “Babe, why do you say that? Why, Babe? Babe, aren’t you upset? Babe, talk to me!” No one who’s ever lived has talked like that, and I refuse to let the matter go. In a packed stadium when you’ve lost track of someone, sure. Scream it out. Again and again. Or after a child has wandered away from the swing set at a playground. But when it’s just you and just them in chairs in a quiet room late at night with no hope of visitors? I want to shoot myself in the face just thinking about it. I’d have been less annoyed had the characters been mimes.
Okay, like I was saying, Babe shot her husband. Turns out she was fucking a young black man (a teenager, in fact), and naturally, she preferred his stamina and staying power to the limp noodle her dull milquetoast of a man brought home every night. The shooting causes a scandal in this sleepy little burg, and with Babe out on bail, the Magrath sisters (Babe, Lenny, and Meg) have to get together to go over old times, spill secrets, and fight with a nosy neighbor who is supposed to be the villain of the piece, but remains the one person who tells the truth about the family (hint: they’re trash). Seems the Magrath matriarch killed herself years back, only it can’t be that simple. No, she had to hang herself in the basement along with her cat. That sets the sisters on different paths, but you know damn well everything’s going to end with birthday cake, laughter, and reconciliation. Just like real life.
And because Meg (Jessica Lange) is back in town (she’d fled to California to be a singer), there has to be an old flame afoot (Sam Shepard, playing Doc as if he’d been directed to personify a TBI). Speaking of which, was it director’s intent to shed light on a brain damaged community? If so, maybe I’d go easier on everyone, but for the life of me, I can’t remember a cast so universally lacking in grey matter.
Every last character is stone stupid, though no one tops Diane Keaton’s career nadir as Lenny. Never in the history of motion pictures has a character name been more apt. Mugging and chewing scenery as if paid by the yard, Keaton’s Lenny is supposed to be a tragic figure in that she’s all alone, sans husband, spending her days taking care of an ailing grandfather. But she’s so off-putting, so unappealing, that few scenes went by where I wasn’t hoping she’d give up and stick her head in an oven.
Instead, that honor goes to Babe, who decides to end it all because her 15-year-old lover has been sent away to keep him from being lynched. Let me repeat that: the character we’re supposed to love the most is distraught because she can no longer engage in statutory rape. A perfect holiday movie for the whole family.
Filling the time further, we see meetings between Babe and her attorney. That nasty neighbor being chased out of the house by a broom-wielding Lenny. The gals gossiping on the couch. An emotional look at an old photo album. It all seems to suggest a feminist parable, where women have to stick together in a world teeming with the sins of menfolk. Where every male character we see is either a dolt, an idiot, a simp, or a buffoon. Fair enough. But usually in such tales – and it seems fair to expect it – shouldn’t the women be at least a little better by contrast? Not perfect, mind you, but also not inhabiting every last stereotype of the caustic Southern belle?
But even this invests far too much analysis in the enterprise. I simply didn’t care. Even now, the movie still fresh, I can’t remember any of the dialogue. In fact, I refuse to admit there was any. I’m just so glad it finally ended, that I think I erased it all the second the credits rolled. A box checked, nothing more. The very opposite of entertainment, with an Oscar pedigree impossible to defend. The cinematic equivalent of being waterboarded, with a simultaneous colonoscopy for good measure. A hateful, dreary, monotonous mess of mendacity. Shitting the bed has never been so ghastly.
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