Wabi-sabi Hearts

I am a longtime Anthony Hopkins fan, so much so that I decided not to go and see Hannibal, since it was by all accounts a very bad movie based on a very bad book. Like most fans, I hate to see those I admire embarrassed in public. So I looked forward to the next Hopkins film, Hearts in Atlantis. I'm not the only one, either. I went on the Sunday afternoon after it had opened, first show of the day, and the theatre was full, with mostly middle-aged people or older.

First we got the well-worn Steve King set-up of the pre-adolescent boy on the cusp of some life-changing event (How I Was Never The Same Again, aka Lost Innocence). Very shortly into the movie, fortunately, Hopkins' Ted Brautigan arrived on the scene in his understated beige clothes and easy, unregionalized American accent. And as usual, it was impossible to take my eyes off him or to keep from trying to see around the edges of the screen to follow when he moved off.

The boy, Bobbie, is a sweet kid lusting after a bike he can't afford ("What does this character want?" I can hear the acting coach's drill; what a bore). The young actor who plays Bobbie has a nice line in good-hearted inexperience and curiosity, conveyed by the upward, unblinking stare of his big brown eyes into the adult world. In close-ups he also has a realistic crust at the corners of his lips, such as kids acquire by not bothering to wipe their mouths after lunch. He has cute, cheery friends (a sinewy, dark boy and a bright-faced girl, but for a better take, watch the beginning and end of Big). His mom is a sharp-nosed shrew ever on the restless lookout for a new man (Bobbie's father is years dead), and her son is primarily a nuisance to her.

These are the major figures. They are effectively presented stereotypes, and none of them matters a damn — except for Hopkins' Brautigan.

Why?

Here's a stocky, bland-faced fellow with a thick torso, a bald-spot that he doesn't bother to disguise, and hands showing a bit of the puffyness of age. He walks around his upstairs rooms in his trousers and undershirt and only once raises his voice throughout the whole movie. He shows up, he mysteriously affects the household that he stays with as an upstairs lodger hiding from sinister pursuers, and he goes, leaving them all behind forever.

No guns. No car chases. No idiotic feats of outrunning explosions or rampaging dinosaurs or what-have-you. No vows of revenge, no "hot" or cutesy sex-talk, no promises of treasure or renown.

There's just this slightly podgey old guy who has some understated psychic powers; we witness his short time of filling in as a Dad-figure for Bobbie. The story, so slight as to be nearly non-existent, is a framework on which to hang some domestic scenes out of another time (the setting is mid-Cold War), scenes of kids doing their kidly things in the streets and woods roundabout their dull northeastern town. It all moves very slowly toward its predestined end.

In fact, there's very little here that you haven't seen many times before (facing down the bully, the bully strikes back, the heroic achievement, the bully gets his, the best friends leave or are left behind, the mom learns the error of her ways, the child tries but cannot prevail in the huge and treacherous world of adults).

Except for Hopkins; he's something else. You can't overlook him, you can't dismiss him (even though you know the story he moves through is well-crafted, sentimental candy). And you can't stop looking at him even though he's not young and beautiful as, say, Johnny Depp is young and beautiful.

What you're looking at is age. No, Hopkins makes you willing to look at age, and in this culture that's no mean feat. His work here reminds me of nothing so much as pictures by a photographer whose name I have, alas, forgotten, an older man who works with close-ups of his own sagging body — coarse hairs, bulges, and liver-spotted, crepey skin — a man who insists on what he is and on forcing our beholding eye to acknowledge the truth of time's passage, its ravages, and the peculiar beauty it confers.

I have a name for that kind of beauty. I didn't until recently, but I just happen to have one now. I came across an article in the Utne Reader last month about a Japanese term, "wabi sabi", meaning (as I recall it) appreciation of the beauties of imperfection, of things as they are rather than as they ought to be. A very Zen concept. It means a preference for the used and battered, the cracked and crazed and tarnished; the old, even, over the shinily new and polished. It means, I think, the elegance of plain, quiet truth over the glossy lies of image, manipulation, and willful pretense.

Now, a movie is a lie, for our entertainment. The trouble here is that the existence of this rock of wabi sabi authenticity reduces all the careful, professional tuning of everything else on the screen to a sort of matte-finish Norman Rockwell painting. Just sitting at a table drinking root beer, Hopkins annuls the carefully assembled background and the best efforts of everybody else to match him.

Nothing does. While he's onscreen, yes, you accept it all for the sake of seeing this guy play it out. So it's the Red-hunting years, the dark, depressing reign of J. Edgar Monster, and beneath the surface of this small town's life lurks a struggle to cage a wild talent for dark purposes, all glimpsed through the eyes of a child who's just there to watch. When Hopkins is offscreen, you merely wait: through all the children's romping and the mom's selfish primping and a wash of pop music that's supposed to draw us back into those times.

The kids play, struggle, emote. They're good; they are actors. You don't care.

At least, I don't, and this is why: they aren't showing me anything I haven't seen a hundred times before. Hopkins is doing something besides acting. He's putting himself, aging and weathered and real, on the screen for us to see, to absorb, to reflect on. He's performing this stage of his mortality.

This is something that all our talented older performers can do for us, if they choose to; not many do. Consider the articulated doll that has been impersonating Liz Taylor for lo these many years, or the many obvious face lifts and implants and other nips, tucks, and make-overs on offer in Hollywood, all for real reasons having to do with getting work in a youth-obsessed industry, but having nothing to do with an honest acknowledgement of the passage of time.

Hopkins, in this film, looks honest to me; not belligerently honest, just straightforward. It's as if he says, Here's me at my age, and if I were really this imaginary guy Brautigan at this age, this is what he'd look like and sound like. Not polished, not ironed out, not elegantly coiffed with a distinguishing touch of silver, not tailored to a T. Just an old guy with a lived-in look and something magnetic at the core that makes you want to watch him, and see what time has done and what it hasn't.

It's a risk, doing this. What if people say, "Ugh, and he used to be so handsome! I wish I hadn't come, I'd rather remember him as he was"? What if people say, "My God, doesn't she know how she looks? How embarrassing! Why doesn't someone tell her she should have retired years ago?" What if people say, "Sheesh, what do I care what happens to some old coot in a made up story? Give me young people on the screen and lots of fake sex and fake fights to keep me distracted from my high blood pressure"? And so on.

Maybe some people will say those things.

But for those of us in the audience who can just watch, there are rewards.

Questions float to the surface as I think back to that bright, crinkle-lidded gaze, that quick, husky voice. What are the powers of age? Are there any, really? What are they worth, whom can they help? Do they just come to you with the years (well, no; you can see in an instant that Bobbie's mom will never have even the power of caring that Hopkins' character has, and her predatory boss certainly won't get there)? How do you attain them? Do you want to? What are the alternatives?

How much do children really perceive and respond to in older adults across the gulf of years? What are the best functions of age with respect to youth (I had a grandma once who was more important to me than my poor mom ever was, at least as I see it now; how did I see it then?)?

What is the point of becoming wise in a frightened, foolish world?

What is the point of becoming wise, or loving, or beloved, when chance snuffs you out in an instant (this instant or that, sooner or later)? What traces can we leave on the people we care about, and how is that done? Why do it, and why do they care, anyway, and is it a help or a hindrance?

What is flesh good for, flesh that ages and weakens and slows, when it is no longer quick and young? What is the attraction of wabi-sabi, and how is it related to nostalgia? And how not?

Well, you get the picture; you've had those questions sparked in your own mind often enough (more often, probably, as you've grown older). They are the same sort of questions that arise out of the contemplation of any significant event or observation.

Now, there are no significant events in this hackneyed story, not in the usual sense of things that "happen" in films. But there is this significant performance of aged authenticity. I can't help but recognize this, because I'm 62 myself, and long after seeing the film I'm still thinking about that performance, about that presence — only a screen presence, mind you, not even as close as on a stage — and the questions still rise and turn in my mind.

I'd advise you to to see Hearts in Atlantis; it's a pretty good movie, but Hopkins is worth the whole damn thing — for those who can see the homely virtues of wabi sabi gleaming modestly amid the lush gilding of sentiment.

--SMC
October 1, 2001

Copyright © 2001 by Suzy McKee Charnas