In honor of Diane Keaton’s AFI Lifetime Achievement Award tomorrow, here’s Eric Blume with a look back at Crimes of the Heart (1986)
Beth Henley won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her play Crimes of the Heart, and five years later it was retooled by Henley herself in a film version directed by Bruce Beresford. The film teamed three of the biggest actresses of the 80’s: Diane Keaton as the oldest spinster sister Lenny, Jessica Lange as saucy middle child Meg, and Sissy Spacek as spacey youngest Babe.
Keaton is forced to carry the film for the first ten minutes out of the gate, and she’s strapped with some clunky exposition. She feels tentative, which is partly aligned with her character, but in a way where she feels not fully assured, like she’s finding her way into the role. Her Southern accent doesn’t come easily to her, and it takes her a while to learn how to make the accent soar to funny dimensions.
But then ten minutes in, she has her first scene with Lange, and the film starts to find its groove...
Keaton and Lange load the segment with forty years of sisterhood, capturing a lot of the dynamics which will continue to play out throughout the film. Still, both Keaton and the movie feel reigned-in for the first half hour, unable to escape the staginess. But as Beresford begins to take advantage of the family house as a real space, it all starts to feel like a movie, and the actresses get to do their thing.
Does anyone explode comically better than Diane Keaton? Think of her peerless breakdown about her empty water well in Baby Boom, or her prolonged crying jag in Something’s Gotta Give. When Keaton lets go, with abandon, she hits incomparable heights. Her instincts for comedy are so natural, and so unique, they simply kick in. She’s never “playing anything comically” and in fact the beauty of her acting is that she plays the dramatic stakes in a comedy, fully in character.
Keaton is gifted several of these humdingers in Crimes of the Heart. Her biggest and funniest is during a tirade against Lange, when Meg eats “one little bite out of each piece of candy” in a box that is Lenny’s only birthday present. As is often true in real life, this small incident unleashes much larger resentments and angers. Keaton has a seven-minute stretch where she scales up and down, out of control about a box of candy, losing her point, rebuilding it, fleeing, breaking down, and then storming off again in a funny comic run. You can’t imagine any other actress pulling it off better.
Nobody is likely to argue that Crimes of the Heart is a masterpiece, but watching these three great actresses together, deep in their prime, is a joy. In any given scene, you can actually see them inspiring each other: they plumb every inch of the material to get the maximum fireworks. They all have confidence that the small moments are the big moments in a piece like this, and they find subtle, funny communications behind each others’ backs. The performances are both naturalistic and stylized, with all three in perfectly matched pitch together.
Spacek finds a zany grace that carries the most absurdist scenes (she was the film’s Oscar nominee, along with supporting actress Tess Harper and Henley's screenplay), and Lange brings much-needed tangy bite and anger to the film. Both actresses are superb, as always, but Keaton is the glue. Lenny has so much invested in her sisters, and less of a life outside of them, and she plays the moments when they come together with shameless bliss. Keaton alights when the sisters are in harmony: her love for Meg and Babe is transcendent, and you feel it bleeds over into Keaton’s love for Lange and Spacek. The final image, of all three actresses holding oversized chunks of birthday cake and hysterically laughing, remains pure magic.
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