If you’re as tired as I am of hearing media pundits bleat about “America’s lost innocence,” you might want to check out Hearts in Atlantis, if only for its insinuation that Lady Liberty was already deflowered back in the ’60s. Like Stand by Me, the 1986 Rob Reiner movie it tries hard to emulate, it’s a highly nostalgic, often funny and sometimes dark coming-of-age tale based on a Stephen King story. But perhaps inevitably, it feels like a rehash (albeit a well-made one), and at times it gets bogged down in its own rose-coloured wistfulness.
The film is essentially one long flashback in the mind of middle-aged photographer Robert Garfield (David Morse), who has returned to his hometown to attend the funeral of his childhood friend, John “Sully-John” Sullivan. Hoping for a reunion with his childhood sweetheart Carol Gerber, Robert is shocked to learn that she has also died. As he walks through the condemned ruin of the house where he grew up, his reverie takes him back to his eleventh birthday, when the three of them were best friends and Nixon wasn’t President yet.
All the familiar Stephen King elements are here, faithfully reproduced by director Scott Hicks (Shine) and screenwriter William Goldman (who also penned Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of King’s novel Misery). There’s the archetypal romanticized small town where kids swim in the local creek and spend hours looking through store windows at gleaming Schwinn bicycles, all to the strains of Santo & Johnny or the Platters. There are the leering bullies, older kids who use malevolence to mask their secret shame. Then there are young Bobby and Carol (Anton Yelchin and Mika Boorem, both last seen in Along Came a Spider), wide-eyed yet prescient kids filled to bursting with the magic of youthful happiness that has long been King’s favourite shorthand for unalloyed goodness.
Into this idyllic time and place comes Ted Brautigan (Anthony Hopkins), a mysterious and evidently clairvoyant stranger who takes up residence in the boarding house where Bobby lives with his selfish, truism-spouting mother (Hope Davis, who never gets a handle on King’s colloquial dialogue). Ted recruits Bobby to read the paper to him for a dollar a week, and the two forge a bond that becomes even stronger after Bobby accidentally acquires Ted’s extrasensory ability. From his strange but wise companion, Bobby learns about life, love, and how America was like a certain legendary city until the grown-ups sank it with their McCarthyism, their Cold War and their Vietnam.
Despite engaging performances from both young leads and a refreshingly low-key turn by Hopkins, Hearts in Atlantis lacks overall focus, and a few stretches are more tedious than elegiac. For every emotionally involving scene (like the tentative first kiss Bobby plants on Carol), there’s some hugger-mugger about a cabal of shadowy “low men” who are after Ted for some reason, or a bit of overripe sentimentality even Hopkins can’t pull off convincingly. These aren’t fatal flaws (and this is far from the worst Stephen King adaptation out there), but they do make the movie feel longer than it should. The ending, complete with a voiceover coda by the adult Bobby, is a final whack of the baseball bat to an audience already black and blue with lost-innocence symbolism.
(2.5/4)