Heavy

Victor (Pruitt Taylor Vince) is a shy, quiet cook at "Pete and Dolly's” restaurant, a roadhouse run by his mother, Dolly (Shelley Winters). The only other member of staff is Delores (Deborah Harry) who has been a waitress there for 15 years. One day Dolly hires a beautiful teenager Callie (Liv Tyler) as a second waitress. Victor is immediately smitten but self-conscious about being overweight he retreats into himself even further.

Heavy which would have been better titled ‘Loneliness’ is a filmic equivalent of a Tom Waits song - there’s the drunk at the bar, the sad-eyed waitress pouring coffee, the truck drivers shooting pool and the balding middle aged protagonist who still lives as home with his mother. It’s a place where no-one wants to be but its better than being alone. Waits would paint this picture for us in a few minutes and let our imagination do the rest. The challenge of film is to at least match that imagined world but although Mangold has the ingredients right he doesn’t quite bring it off.

The key issue is the casting of Tyler, then at the height of her beauty, as the young girl. Tyler is simply too gorgeous not to be incongruous in this setting whilst her sexual innocence and openness seems to be more a function of Victor’s idealizing view of her rather than any psychological reality. Then, Vince and Mangold tend to overdo Victor’s shyness making it seem near pathological. The man is so inarticulately withdrawn that when Delores busts some moves on Victor it hardly seems probable, even if in their younger days they had had a fling and she feels threatened by Callie’s nubile allure. Finally, it is not clear whether Thurston Moore’s soundtrack is intended to suggest an imminent catastrophe but it is so effective in this respect that we spend most of the film waiting for Victor to crack and go on a brutal killing rampage although evidently we should not as the film’s resolution is very different.

On the other hand Harry proves herself a more than adequate actor (Mangold clearly likes to rub shoulders with pop stars - Evan Dando of The Lemonheads appears in a small role as Callie’s boyfriend), capturing her character’s hardness well and Winters is very good as the manipulative mother.

Heavy is a commendable debut it’s just a pity that Mangold wasn’t experienced enough to make it better.

 

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