Crimes Of The Heart

The Southern melodrama is a staple of American film and Crimes of the Heart, despite being directed by Australian Bruce Beresford, belongs firmly within it. It tells the story of the three MaGrath sisters (Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek and Diane Keaton) who come together in the family home in Mississippi, for a reunion of sorts on the occasion of the last days of their grandfather (Hurd Hatfield), on a date which happens to coincide with the shooting by one of them of her husband.

Crimes Of The Heart is very much about secret women’s business: insecurities, jealousies, Infidelities and shrunken ovaries with lots of intimate chatting on porches and a little too much shrieking with either joy or anger. A reworking of a Pulitzer Prize winning play by Beth Henley, who also wrote the script, for all its litany of woes it is a relatively light-hearted, at times even comedic, study of the three emotionally eccentric and very different sisters. Two still live in Mississippi, Babe (Spacek) who is in a loveless marriage and Lenny (Keaton), a lonely spinster who still lives in the family home, while Meg (Lange) the eldest has returned from LA where she went to pursue a singing career that never panned out.  When they were kids their father shot through and their mother hung herself and her cat.  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera

Keaton, who is attired  like a somewhat older Annie Hall, is an odd choice for her role but she holds her own with Spacek and Lange (who manages to go the length of the film looking like a cross-dressing truck driver) both of whom are well-experienced playing Southern women. Indeed in many ways Keaton's is the most clearly defined of the three characters, both Spacek's Babe and Lange's Meg being reliant on the familiar conventions of the genre.  Nevertheless, the three women en ensemble are an entertaining combination. Tess Harper also provides strong support as a busybody cousin and Lange’s real-life squeeze, Sam Shepard, turns up as a goofy jilted lover from Meg's younger days.

Beresford was at the peak of his American career at the time, this film coming between Oscar winners  Tender Mercies (1983) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989) both of which were set in the South. But both were also more focused films than this meandering, familiar-feeling affair which is at best, a likeable diversion.

 

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