Hearts in Atlantis (film)
Encyclopedia
Hearts in Atlantis is a 2001 American/Australian drama
Drama film
A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 thriller directed by Scott Hicks
Scott Hicks
Robert Scott Hicks is a film director from Australia. He is best known as the screenwriter and director of Shine, the Oscar-winning biopic of pianist David Helfgott. Hicks's work has been nominated for an Academy Award as well as winning an Emmy Award.-Personal life:Hicks was born in Uganda, the...

. It is loosely adapted from Stephen King
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...

's novella "Low Men in Yellow Coats", from his story collection Hearts in Atlantis
Hearts in Atlantis
Hearts in Atlantis is a collection of two novellas and three short stories by Stephen King, all connected to one another by recurring characters and taking place in roughly chronological order....

.

Plot

Hearts in Atlantis tells the story of Robert "Bobby" Garfield (David Morse
David Morse (actor)
David Bowditch Morse is an American stage, television, and film actor. He first came to national attention as Dr. Jack Morrison in the medical drama St. Elsewhere from 1982 to 1988...

), a middle-aged man recollecting his past, in particular the summer when he was eleven years old (Anton Yelchin
Anton Yelchin
Anton Viktorovich Yelchin is an American film and television actor. He began performing in the late 1990s, appearing in several television roles, as well as the Hollywood films Along Came a Spider and Hearts in Atlantis...

). During that summer, he and his two friends, Carol Gerber (Mika Boorem
Mika Boorem
Mika Sue Boorem is an American actress who has appeared in the films Blue Crush , Carolina , Sleepover , and Smile ....

) and John "Sully" Sullivan (Will Rothhaar
Will Rothhaar
Will Rothhaar is an American actor.Rothhaar was born in New York City, New York, the son of Michael Rothhaar and Nancy Linehan Charles, both of whom are playwrights, actors and directors....

), experienced many things together, the most mysterious of which was meeting an elderly drifter
Drifter
Drifter or The Drifter may refer to:* Drifter , a person who is continually moving from place to place, without any fixed home or job-Film and television:...

 named Ted Brautigan (Anthony Hopkins
Anthony Hopkins
Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, KBE , best known as Anthony Hopkins, is a Welsh actor of film, stage and television...

).

Bobby lives with his single mother, the self-centered Liz Garfield (Hope Davis
Hope Davis
Hope Davis is an American actress. She has starred in more than 20 feature films, including About Schmidt, Arlington Road, Flatliners, Mumford, American Splendor, The Lodger and Next Stop Wonderland....

), who takes in Brautigan as a boarder. Ted takes the lonely Bobby under his wing, while his mother is busy with her job - including entertaining her boss as a way of paying off debt supposedly left by Bobby's late father. The two form a father-son bond, and it slowly becomes clear that Ted has some psychic and telekinetic powers that rub off on the young boy. These same powers are the reason that Brautigan has come to this sleepy town; he has escaped the grasp of the "Low Men", strange people who would stop at nothing to get their hands on Ted.

Ted offers Bobby a job—his eyes aren't as good as they used to be, so he asks the boy to read a newspaper for him, and to earn a dollar a week, so Bobby could buy a bicycle he wants. Bobby doesn't believe that this is the real job, and he is right. Ted asks Bobby to keep an eye on the neighborhood looking for any signs of the "low men", like announcements about missing pets. Bobby sees one, but doesn't tell Ted, afraid to lose his new friend.

Bobby, Jim and Carol, and John have frequent conflicts with the local town bully
Town bully
The town bully is a stereotypical character, especially from the mythology of the American Wild West. The town bully generally oppresses meeker residents of the town. This character is often featured in movies, sometimes as a greaser or a gangster. In 1980s films, he may be a bad-tempered preppy...

, Harry Doolin (Tommy Reifsnyder), whom Ted is able to scare away by looking into his mind and finding out that his violence is used to cover up the fact that he is secretly a cross-dresser
Cross-dressing
Cross-dressing is the wearing of clothing and other accoutrement commonly associated with a gender within a particular society that is seen as different than the one usually presented by the dresser...

. However, at one point, Harry hurts Carol, and when Ted manipulates her dislocated shoulder into place, Liz arrives, after being raped by her boss, and mistakenly believes that Ted is a child molester. She is confronted by Ted's ability to tell her the truth about what she has been through, and how her behavior is affecting her relationship with her son, providing another reason that Ted must leave. That and the "low men" are closing in on him.

Ted is eventually captured with the help of a tip from Liz. As some form of closure, Ted yells to Bobby as he is being driven away that he wouldn't have missed a moment "not for all the world", and later Bobby mirrors the same feelings.

At the end of the film, a grown up Bobby meets a girl who turns out to be Carol's daughter

Cast

  • Anthony Hopkins
    Anthony Hopkins
    Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, KBE , best known as Anthony Hopkins, is a Welsh actor of film, stage and television...

     as Ted Brautigan
  • Anton Yelchin
    Anton Yelchin
    Anton Viktorovich Yelchin is an American film and television actor. He began performing in the late 1990s, appearing in several television roles, as well as the Hollywood films Along Came a Spider and Hearts in Atlantis...

     as Robert "Bobby" Garfield
  • Hope Davis
    Hope Davis
    Hope Davis is an American actress. She has starred in more than 20 feature films, including About Schmidt, Arlington Road, Flatliners, Mumford, American Splendor, The Lodger and Next Stop Wonderland....

     as Elizabeth "Liz" Garfield
  • Mika Boorem
    Mika Boorem
    Mika Sue Boorem is an American actress who has appeared in the films Blue Crush , Carolina , Sleepover , and Smile ....

     as Carol Gerber/Molly
  • David Morse
    David Morse (actor)
    David Bowditch Morse is an American stage, television, and film actor. He first came to national attention as Dr. Jack Morrison in the medical drama St. Elsewhere from 1982 to 1988...

     as Adult Robert "Bobby" Garfield
  • Deirdre O'Connell
    Deirdre O'Connell (actress)
    Deirdre O'Connell is an American character actress who has worked extensively on stage, screen, and television.O'Connell began her career at Stage One, an experimental theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts...

     as Mrs. Gerber
  • Will Rothhaar
    Will Rothhaar
    Will Rothhaar is an American actor.Rothhaar was born in New York City, New York, the son of Michael Rothhaar and Nancy Linehan Charles, both of whom are playwrights, actors and directors....

     as John "Sully" Sullivan
  • Tommy Reifsnyder as Harry Doolin
  • Alan Tudyk
    Alan Tudyk
    Alan Wray Tudyk is an American actor known for his roles as Simon in the British comedy Death at a Funeral, as Steve the Pirate in DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, as Sonny in the science fiction drama I, Robot, as Doc Potter in 3:10 to Yuma, as Tucker in the Tucker & Dale vs Evil and as Hoban...

     as Monte Man
  • Tom Bower
    Tom Bower
    Tom Bower is a British writer, noted for his revelatory investigative work such as his unauthorized biographies.A former Panorama reporter, his books include unauthorised biographies of Tiny Rowland, Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Geoffrey Robinson, Gordon Brown and Richard Branson...

     as Len Files
  • Celia Weston
    Celia Weston
    Celia Weston is an American actress of stage, film and television, and a character actress. Professionally, she may be best known for her role as Jolene Hunnicutt on Alice.-Life and career:...

     as Alana Files
  • Adam LeFevre
    Adam LeFevre
    Adam LeFevre is an American character actor, poet and playwright who works in cinema, television, theater and commercials....

     as Don Biderman

Box office

The film opened at #3 raking in $9,021,494 USD in its opening weekend at the U.S. box office. The film would eventually gross a domestic total of $24,185,781, fairly short of its $31 million budget, but with an international $6,733,634, it would total $30,919,415, about $80,000 short of the budget.

Reception

This movie received mixed reviews. As of March 2009, it has a score of 49% on Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

, which concludes that "Hearts in Atlantis is well-acted and beautiful to look at, but the movie is nothing more than a mood piece."

Differences from the source material

The story that it was based on had deep ties into King's epic The Dark Tower
The Dark Tower (series)
The Dark Tower is a series of books written by American author Stephen King, which incorporates themes from multiple genres, including fantasy, science fantasy, horror and western. It describes a "Gunslinger" and his quest toward a tower, the nature of which is both physical and metaphorical. King...

. In the original novella
Novella
A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...

, the 'low men' were in fact Can-toi
Can-toi
The Can-Toi are fictional creatures from Stephen King's Dark Tower series and related works. They are unofficially but more commonly known as low men, as in Low Men in Yellow Coats due to their often garish yellow clothing...

, agents of the Crimson King
Crimson King
The Crimson King, also commonly known as Los', is a fictional character created by Stephen King. He is the antagonist in the novel Insomnia the main villain due to a plot twist in Black House and one of the main villains in the latter half of Stephen King's Dark Tower series.-Fictional...

. Ted Brautigan was a 'breaker', a psychic whose abilities made him able (unwillingly, of course) to 'break' down the beams surrounding the Dark Tower, the linchpin of all existence. In order to gain wider audience appeal, the film version of Ted is written as a runaway government agent, his psychic powers being used for national-security purposes. This ties logically to Stephen King's 1980 novel, Firestarter
Firestarter
Firestarter is a novel by Stephen King first published in 1980. It was nominated for a British Fantasy Award in 1981.The book is dedicated to the author Shirley Jackson: "In Memory of Shirley Jackson, who never needed to raise her voice."...

.

There are several other changes, most notably Carol being dead in the film's coda. In the book, Carol is only believed to have died in a violent Vietnam protest. When Bobby returns home, they meet again.
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