Crimes of the Heart (1986)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Absolutely Brilliant!

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

This is an offbeat comedy based on Beth Henley's multi-prize-winning play: the play won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.Here, three totally different sisters are reunited in their Mississippi house as a result of the youngest sister, Babe (Sissy Spacek), shooting her husband. The concern for everyone is what to do about it and wondering if Babe is crazy. A second sister, Lenny (Diane Keaton), seems to be becoming an old maid since she has a withered ovary and is afraid of approaching men. In any case, she is taking care of Old Granddaddy (Hurd Hatfield) and uses that excuse to stay around home. The third sister, Meg (Jessica Lange), has just arrived from Hollywood where she is becoming a movie star or a singer...or something. The one thing she has accomplished there is having sex with a lot of men. When she comes home to help with Babe's problem, she spends the night with Doc Porter (Sam Shepard) who is married with children. The things that unite the three sisters are their memories and the fact that their mother killed a cat while committing suicide some time back. (The murder of the cat with the suicide had made the family a bit famous due to newspaper stories about the incident.) This is a fun movie with three recent Oscar winners sharing almost equally in the overall plot: Diane Keaton had won an Oscar for Annie Hall (1977), Sissy Spacek for Coal Miner's Daughter (1980) and Jessica Lange for Tootsie (1982). Lange would later go on to win another Oscar for Blue Sky (1994).

Dull, pointless, irritating.Crimes of the Heart had an interesting, though not overly original, start. Three sisters are reunited in their home town due to one of them being accused of shooting her husband. A fairly conventional plot device - an event brings an estranged family together, skeletons are revealed, wounds reopened, yadda yadda yadda, they reconcile. However, here there is nothing intriguing at all about their relationship. There's no axes to grind, no skeletons in the closet, nothing to reconcile. So instead of human drama, we just have a rambling, pointless story. Lack of a intriguing plot needn't be the end of it, the movie could be character-driven. Sadly, Crimes of the Heart fails in that regard too. One of the sisters (played by Jessica Lange) is selfish and unthinking, one (Sissy Spacek) is, well, nuts, and the other (Diane Keaton) is plain dull (and her saying "babe" all the time starts to grind very quickly).So there is very little engagement with the characters.Director Bruce Beresford tries to replace plot and character depth with quirkiness, but this just makes the movie irritating.A decent cast undermined by a dull plot and listless direction.

Honestly, there's not a lot to say about this film. Sissy Spacek, Diane Keaton and Jessica Lange star as three Southern sisters who reunite when one (Spacek) shoots her husband. The sisters are, of course, incredibly different and their personalities collide over the course of a few days, dealing with what Spacek's character has done while old feuds come to the surface. Clearly based on a play, most of the action takes place in the same house and the film puts everything on the shoulders of the three central women.Keaton plays Lenny, the matriarch of the trio (both of their parents are deceased and their grandfather who raised them is in the hospital) who is socially inept and often gets stepped on by her siblings. Lange is Meg, the popular and outgoing wild girl, man-eater and failed actress. Spacek rounds it out as the potentially insane and murderous Babe. Tess Harper steals her few scenes as Chick Boyle, who lives next door to the house, but the whole thing is centered around the three sisters and that's what makes it work. The film never takes itself too seriously, despite it's morbid themes and narrative, and the women all do a marvelous job of bringing the laughs mostly without overdoing it.Crimes of the Heart is a film that on paper doesn't appeal to my tastes at all, but I often found myself cracking up at the ridiculousness of these characters. The women play the characters as straight as possible, approaching them as characters rather than jokes, and this helps make it an enjoyable experience as opposed to a grating one, although Keaton does overdo it at times. The characters are erratic and very large, which opens itself up to potential disaster, but in selecting the proper actresses for each role they were able to make it an entertaining little movie. It's a simple, light and enjoyable film; certainly nothing memorable and I'm sure I won't be thinking about it at all in a few days, but a nice experience while it lasts.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS.This movie is classified as a "comedy" but depicts real-life behaviours of people when subjected to suicide of a parent.The three main characters, sisters, each deal with their childhood issues in their individualistic manners.One is withdrawn, shy, and non-assertive as an adult, believes she is defective because of the ignorance of her grandfather in regard to a minor medical problem, and afraid of relationships with men.Another is a chain-smoking alcoholic who hated her father, probably for more reasons than were depicted in the movie, has a long string of men whom she never allows herself to become genuinely close with, and suffers a temporary mental breakdown.The third sister married a controlling and abusive man at her age 18 years, suffers from loneliness and suicidal ideologies, and finally snaps enough to shoot her husband due to his abusiveness.The movie is a triumph in its illustration of accurate human behaviours and reactions to traumatic events and depicts the seriousness of those situations with humour. Additionally, it accurately depicts denial in operation.