The Heart of Me

Watchable but unsatisfying period piece, mistakenly listed on Amazon Prime as a current film; actually it's from 2002. Based on novelist Rosamond Lehmann's The Echoing Grove, which in turn was based on Lehmann's nine-year affair with poet Cecil Day-Lewis (father of Daniel). IRL Day-Lewis dumped both Lehmann and his wife and took up with actress Jill Balcon (mother of Daniel), which might've made a more interesting movie.

On-the-nose casting of Olivia Williams as the straitlaced, conventional sister and Helena Bonham-Carter as the unstable, bohemian sister ensures the best possible outcome for the creaky plot. Nice to see Elinor Bron (Dudley's Moore's unrequited crush in the original Bedazzled) again as the sisters' interfering mother. Paul Bettany does his best with the thankless role of the sisters' wavering husband/lover; the fact that he's so easily bamboozled by his mother-in-law suggests that Lehmann came away from all this with a poor opinion of C. Day-Lewis, which certainly seems understandable.

This film played to a packed audience at the closing night of the London Film Festival last week. The story of an upper class English man falling passionately in love with his wife's sister was so involving I completely forgot myself for the duration of the film (and from what I could see,so did the rest of the audience). It is a flawless film. Intensely moving. The complex characterisations were handled with immense integrity. One of the wonderful things about it was that during the course of the story I both liked and disliked all the characters. By the end it is impossible to judge them, only appreciate what they had gone through. A most wonderful and uplifting film. Paul Bettany is a discovery. An actor of immense subtlety who is not afraid to play a character who appears simply weak on the surface but is actually very complex. A very detailed and brave performance. Olivia Williams is transformed by the character. She plays Madeline, a woman who lives by the strict rules of her class. No emotion is allowed to get in the way of how this class organises their lives and Madeline respects that. When we see her years later in life, Williams makes us utterly believe the immense changes that she has endured. Madeline must forgive her sister Dinah for her betrayal. This seems impossible given what Madeline has endured at the hands of her sister, yet Williams makes us believe in that forgiveness. This was a great lesson to me. To see how you must move on in your life. Helena Bonham Carter is more vulnerable, sensitive and outrageous than I have ever seen her. Her character is on a knife edge. She falls passionately in love with her brother- in- law and from that moment on the film takes you on an emotional roller-coaster ride that I still can't get out of my mind. The film also has one of the best scores I've heard in ages - romantic and tuneful without being slushy or sentimental. It's also a ravishing looking film (maybe that's why I cant get it out of my mind) and yet the powerful images never interfere with the story but add to it all the time. Real cinema.

I was fortunate enough to see this film at the Toronto Film Festival and talk briefly with the Director afterwards.

"The Heart of Me" is a period piece set in London during the 1930s and 40s. It is a European-style film that takes the time to give exposition and background to the characters. It builds slowly and chooses substance over style. The mood is somber and much of the lighting and colour scheme reflects this in a similar manner to the Crow.

It is a drama with a few moments of levity. The three main leads are excellent. Helena Bonham Carter and Olivia Williams play sisters. Helena's character begins to fall in love with her brother-in-law played by Paul Bettany and they have an affair.

I was pleasantly surprised by Paul's acting. I've only seen him before in "A Knight's Tale" and "A Beautiful Mind" where he has played light-hearted best friend characters. His performance here was understated, subdued, and a change of pace from what I had previously seen. I didn't think he was capable of going head to head with Helena but he was.

If you like Merchant and Ivory films, then I think you would like this. It has the same feel as "Howard's End" and "Remains of the Day".

The soul of this film is in the empathy, or it would be easy to judge. Men tend to marry women who think like themselves, but there is that darker side, different from themselves, that some men cannot resist. In the usual case, at least as far as movie plots are concerned, his darker side will drive him to find some lover that is everything that he is not. If he is obsessive, she will be moody and impulsive, otherwise she will be the Eros to his Thanatos. The wife and the lover seldom know each other. In this case, however, he finds both of these women as sisters, adding incest to the convoluted plot. The one he marries is structured like himself, but then he falls in love, or lust, with the other, a neurotic Bohemian whose child-like passions rob him of reason.

There is a fatalistic element to this plot, however. All three characters, while seemingly driven by their feelings, are actually so out of touch with their feelings that they act without reason. We say that it is their "feelings" that are driving their actions, when in fact it is their lack of "reason" that is driving their actions. They are just letting themselves feel without thinking, as though it was "fate" that made such decisions. They can't help themselves. Fate has determined that he will marry the wrong sister, and fate has determined that he will become hopelessly obsessed by the other. What is left for the audience, therefore, is to empathize with their dilemma as presented, and agree without doubt that where matters of love are concerned, there is no room for reason.

What a pessimistic and lugubrious theme! Feelings, passions and emotions, are wonderful and inspiring forces, that can drive us to the heights of ambition, or drag us down to depression, bigotry and resentment. Unless measured by reason they are worthless and potentially harmful. It is "reason" that makes feelings supreme, not just feelings alone. Wallowing in passion without reason only results in self-indulgence and destruction, as evidenced by this film. The events of this story did not "just happen" to these characters as though by fate. Not only is there "room" for reason in matters where love is concerned, but without it love becomes a trap, a disease, and a tragedy. What is missing from this story is not love, but reason.

I've heard that Western religious dogma eschews the thought never mind the act of a man lusting for his neighbor's wife. What really rocks the boat is a married man sappily and hopelessly enmeshed in the arms of his wife's sister. And that's what we have in this dark hued English drama whose scenes alternate between the pre-war social frivolity of affluent men and women unaware that their time was almost up and postwar scenes tieing the story together.

Helena Bonham Carter is Dinah, a free spirit given to studying, and perhaps evangelizing, the gospel of malcontents and revolutionaries in that nonthreatening and oddly endearing manner that insures both bemusement and acceptance by well-to-do English gentlefolk. Olivia Williams is her married sister, Madeleine, a hostess with the mostess, married to businessman Rickie, played by Paul Bettany.

The focus of the film is on this trio, not a menage a trois but a coruscating set of characters wracked by love, lust and confusion leavened by sporadic betrayal and reconciliation.

It's really simple: Rickie sort of loves or at least very much likes Madeleine but his heart and other body parts desperately seek and need Dinah. Dinah loves her sister and her charming adolescent son but she must have Rickie. Madeleine loves both but is blind to the reality of their relationship until... A story of this genre must have a clear and unambiguous "until."

Directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan, the acting of the three principals is, simply, mesmerizingly superb. Helena Bonham Carter is renowned for her period pieces (she can do much more and she does) and she fits into London's prewar world and its gray aftermath as if she actually experienced those times. Paul Bettany captures the lost male guided by his...ah, lust, with but minimal if any moral insight into his conduct. Special mention must be made of Olivia Williams who captures the pathos, hope and desperation of a decent woman swept up by acts of betrayal she never envisaged as possible. I hope we see much more of this fine actress.

The score by Nicholas Hooper is very good but judicious editing was needed to reduce intrusiveness of the music and the sound level ought to have been lowered for a number of scenes.

A fine production.

8/10.