Employing dreary aesthetics, quirky-bordering-on-obnoxious music and initially amusing characters who soon wear out their welcome, Icelandic director Dagur Kári’s English-language debut, “The Good Heart” starts off as a compelling take on the familiar father/son strangers-who-better-each-other dynamic, but eventually devolves into tired and tedious clichés.
The film is a reunion of sorts for Paul Dano and Brian Cox who first worked together on the controversial 1999 film “L.I.E.” which featured a then 15-year old Dano as a young boy who befriends an oddly kind pedophile (Cox). “The Good Heart” is decidedly different; it’s a small (and ultimately useless) testament to this picture that it doesn’t recall its predecessor at all.
Centering on Lucas, a sweet homeless boy (Paul Dano) and Jacques, an irascible dying bar owner (Brian Cox) who struggles to find peace in soothing meditation relaxation tapes and is about to suffer his sixth heart attack — hence the ironically titled picture –Kári’s script doesn’t pain itself to make many deep connections.
Fate (or convenient lazy storytelling ) has it that the two disparate men not only end up in the hospital at the same time (Lucas of an attempted suicide, Jacques of his aforementioned heart attack), they end up in the same room.
The incorrigible Jacques — an irritable and foul-mouthed misanthrope who raves and rants wildly throughout — orders the boy around, trying to get him to turn off the smoke alarms so he can puff ciggies in his room and generally trying to manipulate him for his own needs, all the while berating the staff with loud, ugly epithets. This set up is at least marginally comical, but Cox’s wild-eyed petulance eventually grates.
Soon enough Lucas’s naïve and un-street savvy (homeless people that aren’t street savvy? Sounds like a movie) man-boy character is discharged, much to the chagrin of the nasty old man who eventually tracks down the hole-in-the-wall makeshift squat Lucas has made himself on the streets.
And then the central conceit comes alive; a mistrustful, cantankerous, selfish old man with no kin decides to take this boy in so he can have a successor to take over his dingy, shithole bar. If humor does arise in the film, and it’s not often, it surfaces in the comedic irony of a selfish man making a seemingly selfless act (helping this young boy), that’s actually as narcissistic as anything he’s ever done (vaingloriously trying to shape the boy into his image generally though brutish verbal force).
And from there “The Good Heart” settles into an all-too-familiar narrative rhythm about a seemingly odd and mismatched pair who teach each other a thing or two about a thing or two and bring the best out in each other (they teach each other about life, groan). Guiding Lucas through his impossibly rigid rules of ‘bartender 101’, the grizzled grouch props the boy up to eventually shed his timidity and gain a sense of self-worth, and when a individualistic personality finally emerges, Jacques is finally forced to learn the painful art of compromise.
Naturally, a girl eventually enters the picture, much to the irritation of Jacques (and those who despise cliché), but the female — a Russian girl in need of citizenship played by Isild Le Besco — is nothing but a flavorless prop obviously introduced simply to increase second act complications.
Let’s cut to the chase (spoilers ahead if you care): “The Good Heart” is about a shitty miserable old man with a faulty ticker who is literally given a second lease on life when a boy of pure heart saves him. The metaphor would be bad enough, if it weren’t for the fact the film goes painfully on the nose — no really, the boy dies in an accident and it’s his heart transplant that allows the curmudgeonly barman to live, with a whole new positive outlook to boot (natch). This last act “twist” is groan-inducing and robs the film of any charm it may have displayed earlier.
Shot in a sickly, desaturated gray/green and featuring a twinkly-sad score written by the members of Slowbow (Orri Jónsson and the director Kári, who seemingly sound like a cross between Mum and Tom Waits with some beats), “The Good Heart” doesn’t boast the prettiest aesthetics, and we suppose that’s part of the point, but they sure don’t help its case.
Interestingly enough, when this picture was first announced it had Ryan Gosling playing the young street kid suicide-case and Waits was supposed to play the fractious dying bar man. Maybe that cast would have assisted this picture a little, but it’s doubtful they could have done much to resuscitate the mostly tepid and typical storyline.
More forgettable than downright terrible, “The Good Heart” is really just a promising cast in desperate need of an interesting story. [C-]