Asia Argento and Dylan Sprouse in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. In the opening scenes of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, a seven-year-old boy, Jeremiah (Jimmy Bennett), is removed from an apparently loving foster home by state child authorities. He's entrusted to the care of his birth mother, Sarah (Asia Argento), a 23-year-old woman who, we soon learn, is living a very scary existence as a drug-addicted prostitute serving the unbridled needs of men she meets along the major truck routes that cut through Appalachia.
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things can be viewed as a cinematic supplement to the newly issued Encyclopedia of Appalachia, in which the land, people and traditions of the region are carefully catalogued and endowed with disturbingly specific dramatic flesh. It is the word made into flesh that is most unsettling when one sees this beautifully crafted motion picture, because, of course, real child actors — Bennett as the young Jeremiah, and later on, identical twins (Cole and Dylan Sprouse) when Jeremiah is 11 — must participate in scenes that we know might be unendurable in real life.
A second viewing (my first was on the huge Castro Theatre screen) reveals a story that is less a Baedeker of contemporary American child abuse than a very troubling portrait of the descent into madness of a young woman, viewed through a child's eyes.
First, let's take the boy's own story. Jeremiah is subjected, in turn, to a crappy diet (unheated Spaghetti O's), to a mom given to extreme mood swings and dispensing her own drugs to the boy as "medicine," to the uncertain disciplinary practices of a series of very bad "dads" ranging from a beating with a belt to anal rape, to a three-year sojourn in the custody of Sarah's Bible-thumping family, to a very bizarre scene where Jeremiah is protected from Sarah's psychotic breakdown by a nelly boyfriend played by Marilyn Manson.
The religious chapter could be a movie in its own right as Jeremiah is turned into a pipsqueak street preacher by his steely-eyed grandparents (Peter Fonda and Ornella Muti) — a full-submersion baptism into tough love that has its later repercussions when Sarah "steals" him back again. Heart is Deceitful is, among many things, the story of the unintended consequences of a strict religious upbringing. Both Sarah and her many boyfriends warn Jeremiah not to preach to or judge them, but of course, the Bible is one of his few guideposts to survive their chaotic truck-stop universe.
The religious pit-stop features some of the film's most startling dramatic cameos. Peter Fonda's unforgiving preacher recalls, in a truly absurd way, dad Henry's work for Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in the West. John Robinson is scrumptious as a fleshy young apprentice preacher who can cry on cue. It is the first time in my reviewing career that I've ever wished that a child remain in religious custody.
Lab coast
The remainder of the film careens madly along like the last season of Six Feet Under, with station stops in a badly-run speed lab (featuring that show's resident charming lunatic Jeremy Sisto) and a shopping mall where Sarah's breakdown is finally complete and on display for all to see.
Asia Argento does triple duty — lead actor, director and co-screenwriter (with Alessandro Magania) — and excels in each job. As Sarah, she takes us where we don't want to go: into the heart of a permanently damaged young woman whose need for the child's company ventures into territory that most Americans have consigned to Oprah or religion. Young Jimmy Bennett is sublime as his little eyes grow into moonlike saucers when Sarah confides simultaneously that she both wants him and would have had him aborted had Bible dad not forbade the procedure. In another road movie this season, a screwball comedy, a young man tells his parent, "TMI, too much information."
Argento is masterful at keeping this runaway train of a movie chugging along in its colorful state of hyper-reality. She is also deft at slowly unfolding the story's parallel reality, that Sarah needs Jeremiah to turn into a substitute little girl, a girl who can interact in truly astonishing ways with mommy's trick and mommy's demons.
Director of Photography Eric Edwards has become America's leading film chronicler of childhood's end, in Kids, My Own Private Idaho and The Slaughter Rule. Here, he keeps us nestled in a nightmarish world that hops in and out of magic realism as quickly as mom sheds unsuitable boyfriends.
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is based on the second novel penned under the name JT LeRoy by San Francisco's Laura Albert. Having touched off a scandal in the bohemian culture world that is as prickly as Barry Bonds' steroid-fueled home-run statistics have proven to be in the universe of Major League Baseball, it must be said that Albert never claimed that her brilliantly evocative fiction was anything but fiction. I can understand why a Los Angeles Times critic who hailed Albert's literary alter-ego ("JT LeRoy is an authentic wunderkind") might feel had. Maybe literary boho's need our own commissioner, to tell us whether it safe to trust the stories that touch us, no matter what deceit may have been present at their birth.
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