The first of fictitious author JT LeRoy’s stories to hit the silver screen, breakthrough director Asia Argento delivers “Heart is Deceitful..” like a Fed-ex from Hell. She also delivers on the promise of an ultra-gritty and ultra-real story of growing up bad on the permanent wrong side of the tracks in America. Jimmy Bennett and the Sprouse twins, Dylan and Cole, show some acting chops far beyond their years in playing the kid Jeremiah who God has seen fit to shackle with a mother not even a mother could love. Born to psycho parents played to the hilt by Peter Fonda and Ornella Muti, mom Sarah (played by director Asia Argento) has grown up harboring demons. In fact, Sarah has more demons than L.A. has used cars. A character from a book with a biblical title, on film Sarah breaks all ten commandments in the first eight minutes.
Which brings us to the “R” rating of the film. It’s for real, ladies and gentlemen---leave all but the most mature kids at home. The scenes in the movie are almost entirely composed of vignettes dealing with addiction, failure, despair, insanity and the slow descent into humiliating and incapacitating self-induced paralysis and death. Then the going gets rough with child beating, rape and neglect and the current state-of-the-art depiction of a mother who defies the term in every way except in her own misshapen and inarticulate need to connect. The story is a surreal version of the standard TV family of four, like “Leave it to Beaver” on LSD. The father is a string of soft and stupid failures who are as ignorant of their own needs as they are of others’. The number one son is Jeremiah and his siblings are “Fleshy Boy” (Ben Foster--“North Country”), Buddy (Michael Pitt—“Rhinoceros Eyes,” “The Dreamers,” and “Murder by Numbers”) and a string of nameless, discarded, warehoused children all bundled into one, nameless victim of adult ignorance. The mother is Sarah who lead Argento spirals downward like a crippled F-111 but always pulls up at the last moment. Like Laura Dern in “Citizen Ruth” Sarah gets the last laugh as she staggers away to regain consciousness and huff again while the so-called social structure collapses around her.
For the record, JT LeRoy has apparently been outed as Laura Albert, a social worker with a gift for the pen and a plethora of stories. In 2000 she wrote her debut novel as JT LeRoy, a 20 year old man who grew up with a drug-addicted truck-stop hooker for a mom and went on to the big time as a street hustler in California. Apparently this persona struck a chord, as did Ms. Albert’s writing, because the story took the literary scene by storm. If the work was a bit of a fraud in not being written in the true first person by a real tortured child, Albert’s fun subterfuge apparently appealed. Doubtlessly the cute public interview with her sister-in-law in disguise as the real JT LeRoy helped; sort of a paste-in-the-green-stamps junket for child-abuse activists.
Public relations tricks aside, this is a good story and a good first film for breakthrough director Asia ( a-SHEE-a) Argento. Coming from a long line of film makers and music composers, Argento’s father is famous for several dozen Italian horror/fantasy flicks. Although there are only a few award winners among them, Asia is certifiably drenched in the industry, with a talented drift towards the ostentatiously trashy. Although she is quoted in the press materials as apparently taking the themes of child molestation and male-domination seriously, the film comes off so successfully as an allegorical fantasy that few audiences will relate to those surface themes. Sarah is no more believable a mother than Citizen Ruth, and Jeremiah is no more believable a child than Oliver Twist. A father like Marilyn Manson would have to be seen to be believed. Although legitimate symbols, they are ultimately fictitious composites like JT LeRoy himself; framed in a surrealistic world of tattooed male clowns and corrupted, rotting parental figures.
If Argento’s tendency is to tell her story with a backdrop of the fantastic, complete with her father’s blood red plumage and Marilyn Manson’s cultish Episcopalian baggage and robotic appendages, she does it with flair. The result is appealing, but more in the sense of Gaiman and McKean’s “MirrorMask” than in Solondz’ “Palindromes.” In gaining the freedom of the fantastic, she is able to create more beautiful scenes, but the more beautiful the scenes the farther the films strays from believable story telling. Nonetheless a brick in the wall of children’s rights and perhaps part of the key to unlocking the child in us all.
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