Salocin

Hearts in Atlantis

Based on a Stephen King novel, and set in the 1960s, Hearts in Atlantis paints a detailed portrait of a young boy, Bobby, whose life revolves around his two best friends, Carol and Sully, and his slightly strained relationship with his mother, who is too distracted to properly care for him, and struggling under the financial strain of raising a boy without his deceased father to help.

The setting is painstakingly reconstructed, with all the relevant paraphernalia of the time, including the classic radios, baseball items, architecture and vivid colour that films of the period tend to employ. The discreet, seedy underside of the local populace is also present, and we are made aware of it through inferences we can make about his mother. He remains aware only of the extent to which she has little money and time to lavish on him.

Into this world steps Ted Brauntigan, played masterfully by Anthony Hopkins. Ted is a loner, who arrives with a very few possessions carried in a couple of suitcases and some paper bags. Bobby’s mother distrusts him immediately, but he inevitable steps into the gap left by Bobby’s deceased father, giving the boy advice and insight on life that can only come from the vantage point of adulthood. He gives the boy a job, reading the paper to him every day, in return for the small amount of money that will allow Bobby to eventually buy the bicycle of his dreams. The real reason for his interaction with Bobby, however, is to ask the boy to watch for The Low Men, suspiciously anonymous, secret-service-like individuals who are seeking to track him down because, in his own words, “I have something that they want”.

It takes little time to realize that Ted has a gift that allows him to see partly into the future, and to see into the minds of others, and it is this gift that drives him away from others. This is hardly the point of the story though, and serves mostly as a pivot upon which to turn a plot more focused on the building of father-son relationships, the passage of a boy into adulthood, and the bittersweet nature of the memory of childhood. While the film leaves us with a slightly melancholy feeling, the overall effect is of a role in the lives of others that all people have, and that that role, while perhaps not central to our own lives, can be of great value or can cause great distress in the lives of others. Although you will not finish the story laughing for joy, I think that in ways somewhat more meaningful, stories such as this want to make us think about the importance of our actions and thoughts on the lives of those around us.

Well crafted and well acted, this drama has every right to claim two hours of your time, even if it was always unlikely to break box-office records or headline award ceremonies.