You like me; you really like me

Another recent movie viewing off of my DVR was Places in the Heart.

Title cards tell us that we're in Waxahachie, TX, in 1935. (The movie was, in fact, shot in and around Waxahachie, southeast of Dallas.) Cut to the Spalding family, about to sit down to lunch. Edna (Sally Field) is the mother with two kids, son Frank and daughter Possum; she's married to Royce (Ray Baker), who's the county sheriff. Being sheriff means you get called at all sorts of odd times to deal with crime in progress, including during a family lunch. In this case, it's a drunk black guy with a gun down by the railroad tracks. The drunk shoots in the air, and then turns his gun on the sheriff, shooting him dead.

Edna is left a widow with two kids and a mortgage, and no job during the Depression. She's got a sister in Margaret (Lindsay Crouse) who is married to Wayne (Ed Harris) and making extra money using her parlor as a beauty shop. But there's not enough business for one person let alone two. The bank manager Denby (Lane Smith) suggests selling the house to pay off the mortgage and moving in with Margaret, but that's a non-starter. Eventually, Denby shows who's got the financial power by using Edna's spare room to house Denby's brother-in-law Mr. Will (John Malkovich), who is blind and has nowhere else to go except the state home for the infirm.

Also whoing up is Moze (Danny Glover), a former sharecropper's kid who, with the Depression on, is going around looking for odd jobs in exchange for a little bit of money, or room and board. Of course, he's not above stealing from Edna to make ends meet, but when the police catch Moze, Edna and Moze come up with an idea that will help both of them: they'll grow cotton on the 30 acres of land that Royce left her, and make ends meet that way. Not that Edna has any experience in agriculture, and not that the bank is thrilled about the idea; in their defense they already had a bunch of foreclosures on failed farms.

Still, Edna and Moze set out to farm the land, with Will helping out around the house in whatever way they can. It's a difficult life, and if you've watched movies like The Southerner or Cabin in the Cotton, you can imagine all the hardships that these people face. One particular difficulty comes when a tornado hits town. A lot of houses are destroyed, although at least Edna doesn't suffer as much as a lot of people.

Places in the Heart is excellent, filled with great performances. If the movie has one flaw it's that the movie is formulaic in that you can see a whole bunch of the problems Edna is going to face in her quest to become a farmer. There's also the blind guy in one key sequence seeing more than everybody else, at least insofar as he uses his hearing to infer things other people don't realize are coming. But those are minor flaws as the story, and even moreso the acting is for the most part so good as to overcome any minor flaws.

Amazon and the TCM shop both have one cheap box set with Places in the Heart on it, so I don't know how good the quality of the print is. But I'm glad the movie is at least available, as it really deserves to be seen.