Suffering from too much talk from too many characters and not enough action, the family drama CROOKED HEARTS nevertheless manages to generate strong feelings, mainly from its stellar cast and sensitive direction.
The Warrens try to cope with the vicissitudes of modern life by celebrating their failures as a way of bringing the family closer together. Edward (Peter Coyote), the father, is a career teacher and part-time dreamer who uproots his family from the East Coast to Washington state. He also leaves
behind an affair (with waitress Marg Helgenberger) that threatened his marriage to Jill (Cindy Pickett). He's managed to keep the dalliance secret from everyone in the family except eldest son Charley (Vincent D'Onofrio), who has burned with resentment ever since.
Second son Tom (Peter Berg) returns home from Berkeley, having dropped out within weeks of graduation. He finds that Charley, lacking the will to leave home, is trying to destroy the family from within, hoping to be thrown out. Among other things, he has impregnated Tom's girlfriend, Eileen
(Wendy Gazelle), who married another man after Charley reneged on his promise to marry her. Charley also resists Edward's efforts to find him a job, bringing Edward into conflict with Jill, who feels that throwing Charley out would be best for everybody.
Adapted from a novel by Robert Boswell, CROOKED HEARTS mines a vein of modernist anomie (best exemplified by other writers like Anne Tyler and John Irving) that centers on mildly eccentric characters struggling to define themselves in a chaotic world. Writer-director Michael Bortman works best in
evoking the messy sprawl of the family and clearly defining within each character what the idea of family means. He fails, however, to organize this sprawl into coherent drama. Nonethless, it's a powerful mood piece, like the best works of Tyler and Irving, in its poignant observation of average
people groping to find their places in life. leave a comment