Heartland

As a Canadian of a certain age, I see the title Heartland and I think of a series of books catered towards pre-teen horse girls that got turned into a TV series. But no, this is a distinctly American Heartland that uses the state of Oklahoma basically as a character in this lesbian character drama. American Heartland is a fine movie. I think it executes everything it planned to do. But Heartland is just the next victim of my WLW film burnout era. While the film is competent, there isn’t enough here that’s unique and memorable to me.

If you’re a person who doesn’t like it when fiction buries their gays, Heartland is immediately not for you. The film opens with Lauren’s girlfriend dying in the hospital. Lacking support, Lauren returns to her mother’s house in Oklahoma. While the wide open spaces of the Southwest provide some sense of freedom, her mother’s house is a stiffing environment. Lauren’s mom doesn’t provide emotion support for Lauren, at least somewhat because she refuses to acknowledge her daughter’s sexuality. Lauren’s brother, Justin is also in town, with his girlfriend, Carrie. And well, this is a movie featured on this site so I bet you can guess what happens between Lauren and Carrie.

I do appreciate Heartland’s theme of the simultaneous freedom and restraint of Lauren’s home in Oklahoma. On the one hand, we’ve got these wide open, endless shots of sky and fields. And often in outdoor situations, Lauren seems more free and like her future is as endless as the sky. But within the four walls of her mother’s house, it’s a repressive, claustrophobic environment. The place where Lauren should experience love and support is instead a place where she goes unseen and unheard, even when talking directly to her mother. The setting as theme really comes to a head for me when we get the lesbian sex scene set during a tornado warning. That’s some Southwest LGBT fiction for you.

I found Heartland overall both slow and unoriginal, especially during the first two acts. The film tries to inject the characters with some personality. But that, combined with the often overdone story beats sometimes ends in a place where it feels more comic than serious. Especially in the first act, I sort of thought the film was taking the piss out of this sort of tragic narrative. Choice dialogue often felt like a set-up for a subversion or punchline at the expense of the cliche. But that punchline never arrived.

The best scene is the third act argument set piece. This was a good piece of scripting. We’ve got Lauren, Carrie and Justin to start. And then mom comes in to add even more bad vibes! This scene in particular is really good at balancing overlapping dialogue and pivoting between different characters, their motivations and their complex feelings towards one another. It’s an impressively curated emotional mess. I really enjoyed this final blow-off, even if little of the lead-up particularly interested me.

Heartland is a film that tries to add a lot of emotional complexity to its characters. But it begins from a place of a standard and overdone story structure. I admire the attempts at character complexity and also a focus on characters actively trying to communicate intelligently. But these goals are sometimes at odds. And if nothing else, this sort of emotional, character-driven LGBT drama offers little new within that subgenre. It does okay with its goals and it culminates well. But will I remember this film in a month? Not really.

Overall rating: 5.3/10

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