David Thomson
“…. This isn't Mississippi, it isn't anywhere; it's a home for retired actresses, in the sense that they've given up proper work. You can hardly hear yourself think for the lament of accented speechifying and the twang of lost hopes--not to mention the chewing on chocolates, banana splits and other Southern edibles. If the director had thought of gingerbread they could have eaten the house.
“… Lenny (Diane Keaton) actually lives in the house, tends the garden, does a fidgety twist with her Annie-Hall-goes-Faulkner clothes, hovers over her shrunken ovary and waits for people to forget her birthday….
“…. [W]hen Meg comes home … contrite about having fibbed to her grand-daddy, Lenny and Babe split their sides with too late, girl, he's in a coma. Somehow, you know the actresses called it the laughing scene….
“The trouble with Crimes of the Heart is that there's no life to be found. This isn't a house to which people belong; they have no family history, only jokes and spoofs. The house is a perpetual and pliant stage for their scenes and their plaintive attempts at Southern accent. And the accent if more Vivien Leigh than Mississippi. In neither the writing nor the playing can we believe in the travail of the years or the growth of laughter as an earned response to experience. We do not see lives unfold, as we do in Chekhov's Three Sisters. There is nothing but the indulgent exercises of actresses filling the moment.
“"Sisterhood" here has nothing to do with the state of sisters who have lived long enough to learn immovable antipathies and inescapable fondness. These biddies have all the vibrant, look-at-me vitality of infant show-offs whose only pact is that each gets her solo turn. It's hollow claptrap, dressed up in passable talk and three fluttery, fluffy, overdressed performances as ingratiating that they're like auditions. The women may profess to worry over their sanity, their future and each other. But really they are implacable eccentrics polishing their tricks. What brings their house down--in artisitic ruins--is the ghastly artifice of their minds and the lack of anything outside.
“It's pointless to praise Spacek, Lange or Keaton, or to adjudicate the contest they are so feverishly and discreetly engaged in. But one should say that Beresford, at best a weak, anonymous director… has given up and left the screen to the ladies. This has a further disadvantage: There are not enough group shots in which we can see physical and emotional interaction. When Lenny and Babe have their hysterics, they have them in self-contained close-ups from which they cannot reach out. [I recall hysterics in group shot.]
“Crimes of the Heart may do well. It is so smug and pie-eyed about survival, yet it poses so few real threats. But let's kill one fallacy--that a movie like this is good for American actresses, full of the opportunity that is normally denied them. In the last decade, Hollywood has responded to feminism with several films in which women rule: The Turning Point, 9 to 5, Agnes of God, 'night, Mother and now this. They don't help, for they show us little fresh or of value about women or anything else. Instead, they propose a claustrophobic emotional domain for women: a reservation. What might stimulate actresses, and enlighten us, are films in which women meet the regular problems and joys, many of which are made by or with men. Beware of great actresses in films where the few men in sight are stooges for their lines. And beware of the fatuous exaltation that closes Crimes of the Heart--the sisters joined together in a freeze-frame, as if they were rehearsing how they'd accept their Oscars.”
David Thomson
California Magazine, Feb. 1987
“… Lenny (Diane Keaton) actually lives in the house, tends the garden, does a fidgety twist with her Annie-Hall-goes-Faulkner clothes, hovers over her shrunken ovary and waits for people to forget her birthday….
“…. [W]hen Meg comes home … contrite about having fibbed to her grand-daddy, Lenny and Babe split their sides with too late, girl, he's in a coma. Somehow, you know the actresses called it the laughing scene….
“The trouble with Crimes of the Heart is that there's no life to be found. This isn't a house to which people belong; they have no family history, only jokes and spoofs. The house is a perpetual and pliant stage for their scenes and their plaintive attempts at Southern accent. And the accent if more Vivien Leigh than Mississippi. In neither the writing nor the playing can we believe in the travail of the years or the growth of laughter as an earned response to experience. We do not see lives unfold, as we do in Chekhov's Three Sisters. There is nothing but the indulgent exercises of actresses filling the moment.
“"Sisterhood" here has nothing to do with the state of sisters who have lived long enough to learn immovable antipathies and inescapable fondness. These biddies have all the vibrant, look-at-me vitality of infant show-offs whose only pact is that each gets her solo turn. It's hollow claptrap, dressed up in passable talk and three fluttery, fluffy, overdressed performances as ingratiating that they're like auditions. The women may profess to worry over their sanity, their future and each other. But really they are implacable eccentrics polishing their tricks. What brings their house down--in artisitic ruins--is the ghastly artifice of their minds and the lack of anything outside.
“It's pointless to praise Spacek, Lange or Keaton, or to adjudicate the contest they are so feverishly and discreetly engaged in. But one should say that Beresford, at best a weak, anonymous director… has given up and left the screen to the ladies. This has a further disadvantage: There are not enough group shots in which we can see physical and emotional interaction. When Lenny and Babe have their hysterics, they have them in self-contained close-ups from which they cannot reach out. [I recall hysterics in group shot.]
“Crimes of the Heart may do well. It is so smug and pie-eyed about survival, yet it poses so few real threats. But let's kill one fallacy--that a movie like this is good for American actresses, full of the opportunity that is normally denied them. In the last decade, Hollywood has responded to feminism with several films in which women rule: The Turning Point, 9 to 5, Agnes of God, 'night, Mother and now this. They don't help, for they show us little fresh or of value about women or anything else. Instead, they propose a claustrophobic emotional domain for women: a reservation. What might stimulate actresses, and enlighten us, are films in which women meet the regular problems and joys, many of which are made by or with men. Beware of great actresses in films where the few men in sight are stooges for their lines. And beware of the fatuous exaltation that closes Crimes of the Heart--the sisters joined together in a freeze-frame, as if they were rehearsing how they'd accept their Oscars.”
David Thomson
California Magazine, Feb. 1987
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