Recensioni de* critic*

This was something new for Spacek: an overtly comic role. There's a bit of Holly Hunter spitfire in her Babe, but while Keaton and Lange are (entertainingly) huffing and puffing around her, Spacek is just hanging back, playing peacekeeper, and dropping a one-liner here and there with aplomb. She even pulls off some climactic physical comedy, in which dark-comic business with a rope, a knife, and an oven reveals Crimes of the Heart to be the comic flipside to 'night Mother.

The stage is set for an escalating black farce on the theme of broken dreams; but all we get, sadly, is a meandering display of half-hearted Mississippi drawl... Occasional bursts of delicious tragic humour nevertheless make this a not unlikeable 'feminist' mood piece.

The story is pretty slight... and the stage origins are very apparent. However, all three actresses deliver stunning performances (though Spacek was the only one of the trio to receive an Oscar nomination), and the result is a warm, rewarding tragicomedy.

[The film is] excruciating: a combination of Beth Henley’s insistently eccentric screenplay, Bruce Beresford’s frenzied direction and the sight of three singular talents on an acting roller coaster with no one riding the brakes.

"Crimes of the Heart" is that most delicate of undertakings: a comedy about serious matters... There are moments when the movie doesn't seem to know where it's going, but for once that's a good thing because the uncertainty almost always ends with some kind of a delightful, weird surprise.

Beresford's fluid angles and gliding camera make the story cinematic. But Henley's attempts to open up her own play are less successful. Story elements that might be powerful when told in a stage monologue become mundane when you see them before your eyes... The "present" of the movie is all dialogue, virtually eventless.

It may be that Miss Henley's work, which seemed so substantial to theater critics, is too fragile to survive the kind of relentless examination the camera gives it. The camera has no patience with affectations of any sort, even with its own.

As with most plays, the writing is much too clever to be convincing as spoken by characters in the more realistic film medium. And yet Spacek does touch us with her purity, Lange with her lazy lustiness and Keaton with her character's potential. One only wishes the actresses had been given more room to improvise.

Thoughtfully cast, superbly acted and masterfully written and directed, Crimes of the Heart is a winner.