Hearts in Atlantis is a
2001 film directed by
Scott Hicks. It is loosely adapted from
Stephen King's novella "Low Men in Yellow Coats", from his story collection
Hearts in Atlantis.
Plot
Hearts in Atlantis revolves around Robert "Bobby" Garfield, a middle-aged man recollecting his past, in particular the summer when he was eleven years old. During that summer he and his two friends Carol Gerber and John "Sully" Sullivan experienced many things together, the most mysterious of which was meeting an elderly drifter named
Ted Brautigan.
Bobby lives with his single mother, the self-centered Liz Garfield, who takes in Brautigan as a boarder. Ted takes the lonely Bobby under his wing, while his mother is busy with her job and entertains her boss as a way of paying off debt supposedly left by Bobby's late father. The two form a father-son bond, and it slowly becomes clear that Ted has some psychic and telekinetic powers that rub off on the young boy. These same powers are the reason that Brautigan has come to this sleepy town; he has escaped the grasp of the "Low Men", strange people who would stop at nothing to get their hands back on Ted.
Ted offers Bobby a job - his eyes aren't as good as they used to be, so he asks the boy to read a newspaper for him, and to earn a dollar a week. That is so Bobby could buy a bicycle he wants. Bobby doesn't believe that this is the real job, and he is right. Ted asks Bobby to keep an eye on the neighbourhood looking for any signs of the "low men", like announcements about missing pets. Bobby sees one but doesn't tell Ted, afraid to lose his new friend.
Bobby, Carol and John have frequent conflicts with the local
town bully, whom Ted is able to scare away by looking into his mind and finding out that his violence is used to cover up the fact that he is secretly a cross-dresser. However, at one point the bully hurts Carol, and when Ted manipulates her dislocated shoulder into place, Bobby's mother arrives, after being raped by her boss, and mistakenly believes that Ted is a child molester. She is confronted by Ted's ability to tell her the truth about what she has been through, and how her behavior is affecting her relationship with her son, providing another reason that Ted must leave. That and the "low people" are closing in on him.
Ted is eventually captured with the help of a tip from Bobby's selfish and unforgiving mother. As some form of closure Ted yells to Bobby as he is being driven away that he wouldn't have missed a moment "not for all the world" . And later Bobby mirrors the same feelings.
Cast
Reception
This movie received mixed reviews. As of March 2009, it has a score of 49% on
Rotten Tomatoes, which concludes that "
Hearts in Atlantis is well-acted and beautiful to look at, but the movie is nothing more than a mood piece."
[www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hearts_in_atlantis/]
When the film was released on
DVD, it shot to the top of the DVD release taking $48 million in the first two weeks.
Differences from the source material
The story that it was based on had deep ties into King's epic
The Dark Tower. In the original
novella, the 'low men' were in fact
Can-toi, agents of the
Crimson King. Ted Brautigan was a 'breaker', a psychic whose abilities made him able (unwillingly, of course) to 'break' down the beams surrounding the Dark Tower, the linchpin of all existence.
