Hearts in Atlantis feels strangely incomplete. The film was based on "Low Men in Yellow Coats," the first story in Stephen King's 1999 novel Hearts in Atlantis, and adapted by William Goldman, who also adapted King's Misery in 1990 for Rob Reiner. The movie plays as if it were a rough cut of preliminary scenes that lacks the cohesion that might bring them together into a complete story. There's good stuff in there, but it never feels whole.

The problem with the movie may be the source material itself. As Hearts in Atlantis the book was actually five separate stories held together by common themes rising from their distinctly American setting during the crucial years of the '60s and '70s, the stories themselves gained full meaning and weight only in context with the others. By pulling out one of the stories (even though it is the opening story that takes up nearly half the book) and turning it into a stand-alone movie, all of the narrative and thematic weaknesses are highlighted and the deeper meanings do not emerge as clearly. Any and all relevant social commentary has been completely jettisoned, and without the later intrusions of the Vietnam war and the social ills of the late '60s and '70s, the rose-tinted nostalgia for the wistful Eisenhower years in Hearts in Atlantis can seem terribly banal.

The movie opens with a man named Robert Garfield (David Morse) learning that one of his best childhood friends has recently died. Returning to his hometown of Harwich, Connecticut, for the funeral, Garfield then learns that another of his childhood friends, Carol, with whom he had lost contact also died some years earlier. Devastated that, in effect, all the remnants of his childhood are now gone (read: metaphor), Garfield begins to reminisce on those early days.

As a curly-headed, energetic 11-year-old, Bobby Garfield (well-played by Anton Yelchin) spent most of his time with his two best friends, Sully-John (Will Rothhaar) and Carol (Mika Boorem). Although it is Sully-John's death that instigates the flashback, Carol is by far the more important of the two characters, as she and Bobby begin to feel the first stirrings of adolescent romance together and they share their first kiss atop a Ferris wheel. In fact, Sully-John is strangely sidelined throughout most of the movie, pushed off to the margins and practically forgotten.

Having lost his father when he was only five, Bobby lives with his working mother, Elizabeth (Hope Davis), who laments that she does not have enough money to buy Bobby a birthday present (definitely not the Schwinn bicycle he so desperately desires) even though she always manages to scrape together enough money to buy herself new clothes.

Bobby's world is forever changed with the arrival of an older man named Ted Brautigan (Anthony Hopkins), who rents the upstairs apartment over Bobby's house. Bobby is immediately intrigued by the mysterious man, who carried his belongings in paper bags and answers Bobby's questions in duly elusive fashion (when asked where he's from, Brautigan replies, "Some place not quite as nice as here"). We immediately get the sense that Brautigan is a man who is trying to escape from something, but he is so low-key and likable that it's hard to imagine who would be pursuing him.

It turns out that Brautigan has an enormous power that is never made entirely clear—like Brautigan himself, it remains tantalizingly elusive. Simply put, he can see things, including the future. And, because he has this power, he is being pursued by what he terms "low men," who we might surmise are intended to be shadowy government agents in dark hats and trenchcoats, although, in the book, they are supernatural beings who also exist in the world of King's Dark Tower novels (the intertextuality of King's books has existed almost from the beginning of his career, and it is one aspect of his work that never gets translated to screen).

On-screen, Hearts in Atlantis is really little more than a coming-of-age story, with Brautigan providing guidance and reassurance to Bobby as he ambles into the most awkward stage of his life. Brautigan is a kindly role model, showing Bobby the pleasures and rewards of reading great books and trusting him in ways that other adults never do. The scenes between Hopkins and Yelchin are well-played, as both give solid, natural performances. Hopkins is such a fascinating character actor that he has to do little to suggest that there is more than meets the eye about him; the very cadence of his voice seems to carry with it more years of experience and knowledge than his physical body suggests.

If the relationship between Bobby and Brautigan is well-developed and rewarding, Bobby's relationship with his mother is odd and often unnerving. The movie constantly suggests that she doesn't care much about him without ever really venturing too deep into those troubled Freudian waters. A plot turn near the end involves Elizabeth being raped by her boss at an out-of-town convention, and the movie seems rather disturbingly approbative in suggesting that, not only did she deserve it, but it is the catalyst that helps her become a better mother by not thinking about herself so much. Even more disturbing is the way the movie cross-cuts between her rape and a vicious attack on Carol by a local bully, a closet homosexual who violently takes out his confused feelings on others with a baseball bat.

Hearts in Atlantis was directed by Scott Hicks, who was hailed as a wunderkind after 1996's Shine but struck out a few years later with his visually striking, but moody and dense adaptation of Snow Falling on Cedars (1999). Here he seems to be shooting for the commercial mainstream middle, especially given the successful screen adaptations of Stephen King's other nonhorror fiction, including Stand By Me (1986), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and The Green Mile (1999). He gives the movie some rushing visual moments, especially when the camera is let loose in the woods where Bobby, Sully-John, and Carol like to play, but he is mostly content to subsume any authorial identity he might have to the movie's feel-goal goals.

When Hearts in Atlantis works, it is because of the moving human interactions among the characters and the immediately recognizable child's eye view of the world that King loves to use for maximum emotional impact. Although it veers into awkward melodrama at times and brings up issues (especially those of a sexual nature) that it simply can't deal with, more often than not the film works—but just barely.

Copyright © 2001 James Kendrick