If you’re the kind of sci-fi fanatic who has to see every new futuristic action movie no matter how crummy it is — and I come pretty close to that category myself — then of course you’ll check out “Battlefield Earth” regardless of how many cheap jokes critics crack at its expense. The action sequences are acceptable in a generic, Sci-Fi Network way and the Psychlo costumes at least look cool. But don’t say you weren’t warned.

I imagine the novel on which the movie is based, by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, is ludicrous trash (although I haven’t read it and have no intention of doing so), but I doubt it’s as incoherent, as hysterical or as flat-out gratingly loud as Christian’s movie. For one thing, an author can’t subject you to shot after shot photographed at wobbly, off-center angles for no particular reason, weigh every action sequence down with super-slo-mo in lame imitation of “The Matrix” or end every single scene with a vertical wipe.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that “Battlefield Earth” was directed by a software program that absorbed and reprocessed the standard sci-fi elements of the past 30 years: grimy spaceships, alien overlords, the human race reverting to barbarism, someone reading the Declaration of Independence and making sense of it. Sure, Christian has that luxuriant coif and an illustrious risumi (he was art director on “Alien”), but how can we be sure he’s not a hologram or a CIA personality graft?

Christian has supposedly directed eight other films. Now, I pride myself on my appetite for trash culture, and I’m damned if I’ve so much as heard of a single one of them. Come on now: “Masterminds” with Patrick Stewart? “Underworld” with Denis Leary and Joe Mantegna? “Nostradamus” with F. Murray Abraham and Rutger Hauer? Those don’t exist; they were invented to sound vaguely plausible, like something you might have noticed on the USA Network’s schedule one night, and planted on the Internet Movie Database after the fact. If you believe you have seen them, can you prove your memories were not implanted by an alien race from the 31st century?

OK, maybe those Scientology mind-control rays have affected my judgment after all. The first 20 minutes or so of “Battlefield Earth” are quite enjoyable, if you have a weakness for the cheapo decrepit future envisioned by the “Planet of the Apes” series. Jonnie and sultry babe Chrissie (Sabine Karsenti) live in a primitive human settlement high in the mountains, where they were driven after humanity was abandoned by the gods, as their legends tell them, and demons came from the skies to conquer the world. Pepper, a Canadian actor who’s had supporting roles in “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Green Mile,” is well cast as a hooting, growling, half-wild man; with his narrow, pointed face framed by all that stringy hair, he looks like he’s part wolverine.

When Jonnie leaves the mountains to explore the truth behind the legends for himself, he finds that hoariest of post-apocalyptic clichis, a ruined 21st century (or so) city that for some reason has not disappeared or been buried over the course of 1,000 years. (Does anybody besides me think that an enormous amount of science fiction derives from Stephen Vincent Benit’s short story “By the Waters of Babylon”?) As Jonnie stands gazing at an abandoned automobile, another hunter-gatherer type tells him about the gods who drove chariots to and from caves with golden arches.

This is typical of the efforts at humor in Corey Mandell’s screenplay; “Battlefield Earth” wants to strike an occasional note of the kind of self-mockery that worked so well in “The Matrix.” (Keanu Reeves: “I know kung fu!”) But the Wachowski brothers had complete confidence in the imaginative universe they’d created, which enabled them to poke fun here and there without undermining their narrative. Christian never clearly establishes a tone for “Battlefield Earth,” so violating it only furthers the sense that the whole film is a murky, addled mess.

Soon enough, Jonnie is captured by the Psychlos, who have ruled the planet since conquering it in a nine-minute onslaught a millennium earlier. All I can say about that is, if we were overrun by these quarrelsome bozos with their rotten teeth, platform shoes, Peter Tosh wigs and samurai armor, it doesn’t say much for human intelligence or fortitude. As for Travolta’s performance as Terl, the Psychlo head of security, he and Joaquin Phoenix (from “Gladiator”) should be nominated for a special Academy Award: best impersonation of Liberace in an evil starring role.

Travolta is one of the producers of “Battlefield Earth” and is a well-known adherent of Hubbard’s Scientology teachings, but he’s not doing his late mentor any favors by exposing his own weaknesses as an actor this way. By the time the final credits rolled, two guys behind me were performing loud imitations of Terl’s Snidely Whiplash villain cackle, reducing the rest of the audience to hopeless giggling.

Seeing that Jonnie is unusually intelligent for a barbaric man-animal, Terl decides to use a magic machine to teach him all about Psychlo language and technology, with all of human science and history thrown in. (Yes, another “Matrix” ripoff.) Terl, it seems, is a poor manager and a bad guy even as Psychlos go; he hopes not only to loot and pillage all of Earth’s remaining riches but to defraud the Psychlos’ ruling Corporation along the way. “Once we’ve finished mining out this miserable planet,” he announces, virtually drooling, “let’s do the universe a favor and exterminate the lot of them!”

Next Terl sends Jonnie and a group of other humans off to the mountains to mine gold with no supervision whatsoever, so they have lots of time to cram for math exams and plot their uprising. I guess we’re supposed to admire the humans’ pluck and resourcefulness — once Terl has carefully laid the groundwork for their rebellion — but the script takes them straight from studying the equilateral triangle to unearthing some old-school human military technology that was supposedly useless the first time around. No, they aren’t transformed into kick-ass superheroes by finding an old copy of “Dianetics,” but that might have made more sense.

Many questions go unanswered. If the Psychlos are so damn smart, how come they never learned the humans’ language? (If nothing else, the textbooks on dentistry might have been helpful.) Why are they vulnerable to a rebellion by a few dozen “Easy Rider” freakazoids with centuries-old jet fighters? What the hell is going on in all the incomprehensibly edited, computer-graphics-clogged and impenetrably dark action sequences? And what’s that green stuff the humans eat? Guacamole? Vichysoisse? Rotten oatmeal?

It’s tough to find anything like a silver lining here; Forest Whitaker does his agreeably growly bit as Terl’s assistant and Kelly Preston briefly enlivens matters as a babealicious Psychlo vixen. In the larger scheme of things, no crimes were committed here; next summer, after you’ve worn out your DVDs of “Wing Commander” and the “Mortal Kombat” movies, you might rent this and decide it’s not the worst movie you’ve ever seen. It probably won’t convert you to Scientology, but you might pick up some hair tips.

Despite the subtitle that Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor have given their engrossing and massively detailed new biography of Daley — “His Battle for Chicago and the Nation” — the authors depict a man who was rarely concerned with national politics or with political theory or philosophy. The Daley of “American Pharaoh” is a shrewd manipulator who approaches every issue, every conflict, as either a threat to his power or an opportunity to consolidate it. For all his famous malapropisms (“The policeman is not there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder”), Daley was always intensely focused on his prime objective: preserving political power at any cost whatsoever.

He achieved his greatest national fame, and infamy, for defending and even celebrating the almost barbaric violence his police force inflicted on anti-Vietnam War protesters outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Ironically enough, Daley personally opposed the war and had privately urged President Lyndon B. Johnson to withdraw from Vietnam. But in Daley’s worldview, this stance was perfectly compatible with brutally crushing antiwar demonstrations before a national television audience; he saw both the Vietnam conflict and the New Left that arose to protest it as threats to his authoritarian rule over the Cook County Democratic Party, his personal fiefdom.

Cohen, a senior writer for Time, and Taylor, an editor at the Chicago Tribune, have not quite produced the comprehensive analysis that, to use their phrase, “the most powerful local politician America has ever produced” probably merits. For all its encyclopedic marshaling of fact and anecdote, “American Pharaoh” makes only modest efforts at interpreting Daley’s legacy and at situating it in a larger historical context. Nonetheless, it is a vital and necessary work that students of American political history are likely to consult for decades to come.

The authors are more interested in the public achievements and backroom shenanigans of Daley’s 21-year mayoralty, which ended only with his death in 1976, than in his notoriously guarded private life. But when they briefly put their subject on the couch, the results are pretty convincing. Daley was born and lived nearly his entire life in the South Side Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Bridgeport, and the authors argue that its hierarchical values — “discretion, sobriety, plodding hard work, fitting in and a willingness to follow orders” — became his values and those of the Irish-dominated political machine he eventually inherited.

By the time he had plodded his way to the pinnacle of the vast Cook County Democratic empire in 1953 (two years before he was first elected mayor), he was a 51-year-old father of seven and, as Cohen and Taylor write, “a gregarious loner, acquainted with thousands of people but close to almost none.” Readers of “American Pharaoh” will encounter perhaps the clearest explanation ever written of how Daley’s highly formalized patronage system actually worked and an interesting discussion of the ways the machine manipulated vote totals.

In this extended and sometimes bewildering chronicle of skirmishes and subterfuges, one central theme finally emerges: Daley’s tireless struggle to keep Chicago racially segregated. Doing so always required a delicate balancing act because the Democratic machine depended on black voters almost as much as on white ethnics. Daley gave lip service to racial equality and open housing when the occasion demanded but did his utmost to keep blacks trapped in the South Side and West Side ghettos, where his armies of patronage workers and precinct captains could most easily control them. Cohen and Taylor suggest that he was motivated partly by racism but mostly, as usual, by pragmatism: Integration, Daley feared, could drive whites to the suburbs, unleash unpredictable forces in the black community and destroy the Democratic machine.

Perhaps the centerpiece of “American Pharaoh” is the extensive account of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 open-housing campaign. It was intended to be the civil rights leader’s first major foray into the urban North, but King was caught off guard by the vicious mobs of white Chicagoans he met — worse than anything he had encountered in Mississippi or Alabama, he reported — and by the astonishing number of black politicians in Daley’s pocket. The canny Daley refused to play the villain in King’s drama, eventually outwaiting and outwitting him and sending him back to Atlanta with a list of apparent concessions that were fatally vague and unenforceable. The machine had won — for the time being.

Today, though, the results of the King-Daley clash look far more ambiguous. “I see nothing in this world more dangerous than Negro cities ringed with white suburbs,” King warned at the time. James Bevel, a black activist and ally of his, proclaimed, “We will demonstrate in the communities until every white person out there joins the Republican Party.” All Daley’s power and all the indisputable passion he felt for his broad-shouldered city couldn’t confound those prophecies.

With the lone exception of “Thelma and Louise,” which is atypical of his work in many ways, Scott’s post-1982 films have failed to capture filmgoers’ imaginations or to strike the sparks of cold genius that seemed so evident in his early, visionary masterpieces. Yeah, I know that “Legend” and “Someone to Watch Over Me” have their defenders (myself included), but that’s not the point. As for “1492: Conquest of Paradise,” “White Squall” and “G.I. Jane,” well, please. We’re talking expensive candy — really expensive candy — with no chewy center.

So the answer to your question about “Gladiator” is that the lights are blazing and the music’s playing nice and loud, but as far as I can tell nobody’s home. Its re-creation of the Roman world, from the gladiatorial games of the Colosseum to a hill town in North Africa to the barbarian front in Germania, offers in equal parts computer graphics and old-fashioned moviemaking spectacle — and is suitably impressive throughout. It even has a few sneaky moments of emotional power, as when the general turned slave turned gladiator Maximus (Russell Crowe) dreams of meeting his family in the afterlife, or in his stoical friendship with an African gladiator named Juba (Djimon Hounsou).

But for all its grandeur, “Gladiator” is a canned experience, a film that flails around awkwardly trying to find a reason to exist, or at least a compelling story to tell. (Those who claim to see it as an Allegory for Our Time are desperately reaching, if you ask me.) Creating entertainment on an epic scale is not the same thing as creating an epic, and “Gladiator” suggests an elaborate, fancy-dress version of the video game Mortal Kombat. Sure, it has plot elements — a murdered emperor, his wicked son and sultry daughter, the hero’s longing for his dead wife and child — but they mostly seem like exotic window dressing arranged around repetitious scenes of violence.

In the words of film historian David Thomson, Scott is a decorator, a borrower and a synthesist who absorbs and reprocesses many different elements and influences. His borrowings here result in an undigested mash more redolent of his own youth in postwar England than of the second century: Chop up the plots from various Hollywood sword-and-toga epics of the 1950s and mix in the conspiratorial atmosphere of “I, Claudius” and some warmed-over Shakespearean acting. Add the beefy, brooding Crowe for a hint of contemporary angst and stir in some World Wrestling Federation-level mayhem. Serve tepid.

Crowe’s Jeffrey Wigand in “The Insider” was a man who could hardly begin to understand his own complexities; part of the appeal of that movie was watching the amazement with which he viewed his own courage and principle. Maximus is meant to be a man of simple tastes whose pain is all on the surface, and it’s a credit to Crowe that the dullest and simplest character of his career still seems to have clouds and shadows swimming behind his eyes.

The film begins with Maximus leading his legions to a glorious victory over the German barbarians in a stunningly successful mud ‘n’ blood ‘n’ arrows battle sequence. We learn that he was once in love with Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), witchy daughter of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). But like the barbarian battle itself, the Lucilla romance doesn’t really go anywhere or mean anything; I think it’s there only as a plot device, so Lucilla will have a reason to help the enslaved Maximus later in the film.

Out there on the grimly picturesque Germanic front, with the steaming hordes facing his troops and the leonine Harris looking on in King Lear drag, Crowe seems to be playing a loyal general in one of Shakespeare’s lesser history plays. This impression grows stronger with the arrival of the unfortunately named Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), the emperor’s preening, languid-eyed son. He shows up too late for the battle but just in time to murder his father and stop him from passing control of the empire to Maximus, who in any case only wants to go home to his Spanish farmstead. Phoenix is something of a scenery muncher at the best of times, and perhaps he and Scott agreed that playing a decadent Roman usurper is no occasion for actorly restraint. Commodus spends much of the film bellowing or hissing like an asp and, his queeny demeanor aside, trying to slip between the sheets with his sister, Lucilla.

Maybe the plummy BBC accents adopted by Phoenix and the Danish-born Nielsen are intended to make them seem plausibly related to the Anglo-Irish Harris, but the effect is somewhere between Monty Python and an ambitious college production of “Antony and Cleopatra.” I don’t know what Scott was thinking when he cast Derek Jacobi in a minor role (as a senator devoted to restoring the lost Roman republic). All it accomplishes is to remind us that “I, Claudius” (for you youngsters, the British TV miniseries in which Jacobi starred in the ’70s) successfully achieved the kind of dense melodrama suggested by “Gladiator,” but at a tiny fraction of the movie’s budget and with vastly superior writing.

In the great tradition of improbable movie villainy, Commodus doesn’t have Maximus simply and efficiently killed, but insists that several soldiers transport him miles away, providing him ample opportunity to escape. Struggling home to Spain to find his farm burned and his wife and child grotesquely slaughtered, Maximus somehow — I’m frankly not sure how, and neither are the filmmakers — winds up in the African gladiator training camp belonging to Proximo (Oliver Reed). A veteran of many cheesy costume dramas, Reed seems to relish this slimy Mediterranean tycoon role. “I did not spend good money on you for your company,” Proximo crows to his musclebound trainees. “I spent it to profit from your deaths!” For a while, at least, “Gladiator” sheds its dour pretensions and slides toward the enjoyable-trash vein exemplified by Victor Mature in “Demetrius and the Gladiators” or Steve Reeves in “Hercules Unchained.”

From here on out, we’re talking Schwarzeneggerian dudes in fearsome masks and little skirts, African charioteer babes in body-hugging armor, ravenous tigers and cries of “We who are about to die salute you!” Buoyed by his friendship with Juba, Maximus defeats all comers in Africa and makes it to the big show in the Roman Colosseum, where, of course, he gets many opportunities to humiliate the sinister but incompetent Commodus. (Phoenix never actually utters the phrase “Thufferin’ thuccotash!” but his performance implies it.) You could argue that it’s a waste for an actor of Crowe’s caliber to play the kind of role customarily filled by retired bodybuilders, but at least the grandiose fight sequences keep your mind off the torpid, recycled plot.

It may be that Scott and his screenwriters (David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson) think that the decadent Roman Empire depicted in “Gladiator” has some contemporary relevance. But such comparisons are inherently dimwitted; there has never been an age in human history that resisted vulgar spectacle, and very few that didn’t see themselves as in some way a decline from earlier eras. Sure, the public will settle for bread and circuses most of the time, but, folks, it was ever thus. The real story of compromise and decline here belongs to Ridley Scott, who can find no better use for his ample talents than this grandiose but vacant entertainment.

If Foley’s memoir, purportedly written by him on 760 pages of loose-leaf notebook paper, demonstrates that genuine struggle and agony remain compelling even in the business of fakery, “The Rock Says …” tells a different story. The sometime World Wrestling Federation champion known as the Rock — earlier Rocky Maivia, before that Flex Kavana and earlier still Dwayne Johnson, his given name — is a charismatic, strikingly handsome performer with a finely honed sense of ring shtick. But this ghostwritten autobiography is pretty much what you’d expect from the newborn genre of hardcover wrestling memoir: a milange of appreciative anecdotes about the Rock’s family and friends along with boastful recountings of his bouts that could have been extracted from WWF press releases. Both books have lingered on or near the New York Times bestseller list since they were published last fall, and if that tells us something it’s probably trite: Wrestling, like publishing and life itself, is full of crap and full of surprises.

What the WWF’s immensely successful foray into book publishing — in collaboration with HarperCollins celebrity editor Judith Regan — cannot explain is why a seemingly normal human being like Foley needs to wear a leather mask and get thrown onto cement floors for a living, or why so many Americans are enthralled by that. On one level, it’s a dumb question. Wrestling has become the primary Information Age vehicle for the ancient traditions of circus and popular theater, and it isn’t just reverse-snob academics who think so. It’s right there in the Rock’s book: “We’re producing a live play, a highly physical, male-oriented soap opera, and [WWF president] Vince McMahon is our director. You have to look at it and judge it in that context.”

That said, it’s also true that the 1990s saw a tremendous renaissance of what could be called redneck culture, as wrestling, stock-car racing and country music all exploded in popularity. You could almost say that American mass culture has split into two zones of influence, and that everything
outside the black zone is pretty much the redneck zone. While wrestling still attracts a mainly white demographic, it sure as hell crosses those racial and cultural boundaries more than Jeff Gordon or George Strait ever will. (The Rock, for example, is of Samoan and African-American ancestry.) The peculiar genius of McMahon deserves its own book, but one of its key elements has been his consistent refusal to recognize the traditional limits on the wrestling business. Branching into publishing was no more bizarre than incorporating himself and his family in the WWF’s running story lines (as nefarious heels, of course) or pushing what had always been wholesome Saturday morning showboating into NC-17 lewdness and violence.

Both McMahon’s WWF and his principal rival, Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling, have long admitted that match outcomes and the backstage plotlines known as “angles” are carefully scripted. But the blood shed when the script calls for a star like Mankind or the Rock to be opened up is real enough, as is the risk of serious injury. In the most infamous “shoot,” or unscripted event, of recent years, WWF performer Owen Hart died last May after an aerial stunt went awry, sending him plunging 90 feet into the ring of a Kansas City, Mo., arena.

As a “good worker” known for his ability to take a “bump” (i.e., a horrendous beating), Foley has had his ear ripped off and four teeth knocked out and has suffered eight concussions, several broken bones and countless lacerations — without even going into the muscle tears, dislocations and burn injuries. As the world of ’90s wrestling has become increasingly baroque, his characters have been strangled with barbed wire, impaled on beds of nails and scarred by explosives. He has come home so often wearing the “crimson mask” (that is, with his face covered in blood) that his wife calls his post-match cleanup ritual the “Norman Bates shower.” He once drove his kids to visit their grandparents, he writes, with his scalp still full of glass shards.

As a self-interrogating memoirist, Foley may be a few chops short of Frank McCourt, but through all his tales of mayhem he remains an agreeable raconteur, always happy to spin a yarn or crack a joke at his own expense. Given his greatest area of skill as a wrestler — which is, as he puts it, “taking an ass kicking” — a sense of humor is probably a prerequisite. Before McMahon hired him to play the slobbering, demented Mankind character, Foley had spent years as the shaggy, lumberjackesque Cactus Jack, traveling from West Virginia to Japan to Burkina Faso and sometimes earning as little as $25 per pounding (when he got paid at all). If the catalog of names, places and injuries is likely to numb nonfans, wrestling aficionados will devour Foley’s exhaustive recall of his nights working for the Continental Wrestling Association (Memphis), World Class Championship Wrestling (Dallas), the ultraviolent Extreme Championship Wrestling (Philadelphia) and any number of smaller “territories.”

Foley’s characters have been heels for most of his career, but in Turner’s WCW Cactus Jack briefly became a “babyface” (or good guy), and Mankind was actually awarded a short stint as WWF champion. Even if readers have no real idea why Foley has inflicted this bizarre occupation on himself and his family, we can only feel grateful for these symbolic victories. After all, the bearlike man who allows himself to be thrown off 12-foot-high cages is nothing more than a big sweetie pie, not too far removed from the awkward Long Island teenager who was chronically hopeless with chicks and obsessed with TV wrestling. “I cry during the Christmas episode of ‘Happy Days,’” Foley tells us, “the one where Richie spots Fonzie heating up a can of ravioli by himself on Christmas Eve.” Later, remembering his fixation on female sitcom stars of the Barbara Eden-Julie Newmar ilk, he muses: “I might be able to nail some of them now that they’re sixtyish and I’m on TV.”

It would be a gross exaggeration to call Foley an intellectual, but he eagerly supports the notion that a good education is vital, even for those in decidedly unacademic surroundings. It was all that time he spent in German class that allowed him to utter, one night in Munich, a sentence that, as he observes, “probably had never been used before, and possibly will never be used again: ‘Vergessen Sie nicht, bitte, mein ohr in der Plastik Tasche zu bringen.’” (“Please don’t forget to bring my ear in the plastic bag.”)

There are no foreign-language jokes in the Rock’s book, no wry observations of his own inadequacies (there are none, it seems) or hard-luck stories about wrestling before two dozen abusive yokels in some freezing Appalachian gym. Perhaps that’s only fitting, for the Rock is essentially WWF royalty, a golden child of the squared circle. His grandfather, “High Chief” Peter Maivia, wrestled in bare feet and traditional Samoan drag, while his father, Rocky Johnson, was among the first black wrestlers to make it big in the ’60s and ’70s. When Dwayne Johnson washed out as a pro football player in his early 20s — he had played alongside several future NFL stars at the University of Miami — he had the connections (and the athleticism) to move rapidly to star billing in the WWF.

Those who semiconsciously plow through “The Rock Says …” will discover a few gems of valuable information on the biz, and Johnson’s path toward becoming “the most electrifying man in sports entertainment” is not without interest. For some reason, this book is far more specific about how angles and bouts are developed and scripted than Foley’s is. Furthermore, the Rock’s journey from being a clean-cut babyface the public hated to being an arrogant heel it loved — and finally to becoming the most abrasive and assholish of babyfaces — offers an intriguing lesson in Machiavellian mob psychology.

But a book can capture only the letter and not the spirit of the Rock’s ring persona, a strange and brilliant creation that sometimes seems like a parody of a lost original. His pseudo-aristocratic demeanor, his lexicon of invented catchphrases, his insistence on speaking in the third person, his almost fascistic invocation of “the people” — they’re all good, but frankly they’re best delivered live and in modest doses. Mind you (to lapse into Rock-speak), I’m not saying the Rock is just some roody-poo standing on the corner of Know Your Role Boulevard and Jabroni Drive. Far from it.

It’s just that the rhythm of “The Rock Says …” gets pretty tiresome. On one hand, we get heartwarming family history, supportive comments about the Rock’s hardworking wrestling peers and generic journal-entry thoughts. (“This is a strange and wonderful world in which we live, and it takes time to figure out how to deal with the quirks and peculiarities.”) Then there are disconnected chunks of third-person narration in which the wall between performer and
audience is suddenly rebuilt, and we’re regaled with accounts of how the People’s Champion did layeth the smack down on this, that or the other candy-ass jabroni. The Rock’s classic matches with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin were great live theater, all right, but on the page they lose, well, just about everything.

Rock, here’s a memo from “the most electrifying man in book reviewing”: When it comes to literature, know your damn role and shut your mouth. Or at least hire a competent ghostwriter.

This “Where the Heart Is,” adapted from an Oprah-endorsed bestseller by Billie Letts,
starts off with two adorable female stars and a tone of folksy, trailer-park melodrama
that puts it squarely in Fried Green Endearment country. But as its story becomes more
and more ludicrous, its vision of American life becomes more and more canned and
condescending — a prefabricated blur of ambulances, tornadoes, tearful homilies and
Life Lessons. Maybe the novel’s good intentions felt more genuine, but what director
Matt Williams and the longtime comedy screenwriting duo of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo
Mandel (“EdTV,” “A League of Their Own” and “Parenthood,” just to name a few) give
us here is strictly Middle America as seen on CNN.

When a boom mike bobbing in and out of the frame interrupted a nervous, tender
scene between teenage single mom Novalee Nation (Natalie Portman) and her geeky
librarian lover, Forney (James Frain), the preview audience around me began to howl in
outrage. It was the sound of insult added to injury. After all, we had accepted that one
Oklahoma town might have two working-class unmarried mothers who were beautiful
gamines with perfect complexions. We had accepted the eccentric names: Lexie Coop,
Moses Whitecotton, Thelma “Sister” Husband, Mr. Sprock. We had accepted the
Christian kidnappers and the alcoholic sister in the attic and the character who
becomes a country singing sensation and gets his legs cut off by a freight train. And
then came this, clear evidence that even after all our sacrifice, the filmmakers still
didn’t give a damn about us.

I guess you can’t call a movie “Where the Heart Is” unless you’re preaching a sermon
about Our Troubled Society. In Boorman’s film, a rich, quirky father (Dabney
Coleman) makes his kids go homeless to teach them a lesson, while in the 2000
version the literally barefoot-and-pregnant Novalee winds up living in a Wal-Mart for
weeks after her boyfriend leaves her in the parking lot. There’s something crudely
brilliant about this premise, and Portman is at her best in these early scenes. With
nothing but a shapeless tan sundress, a pair of flip-flops and $5.55 to her name
(she’s phobic about fives), Novalee retains the American faith in self-improvement.
Alone at night in the spooky, hangarlike expanse of Wal-Mart, she reads Mothering
magazine, works out with weights and keeps a scrupulous ledger of her appropriated
food and supplies, marked: “I Owe Wal-Mart.”

Frankly, the story of the girl who gives birth in Wal-Mart would have been plenty for a
low-key, slightly off-kilter American fable in the vein of href="/ent/movies/review/1999/10/15/straight/index.html">“The Straight Story.”
But just when it seems that Williams and his star have settled into a rhythm, “Where
the Heart Is” makes the first of its daffy and ultimately fatal key changes. Novalee
goes into labor on a dark and stormy night (in Aisle 5!), but Forney, the town’s
would-be intellectual, has apparently been stalking her and dives through the store’s
plate-glass window to deliver her baby. Novalee blacks out, perhaps to spare us the
actual birth scene, and the next thing we know, she’s a media celebrity as mother of the
“Wal-Mart baby,” with twinkly, wisecracking nurse Lexie (Ashley Judd) beside her hospital bed.

Now, I’m as charmed by Judd’s unquenchable perk and spunk as the next fellow, but
in terms of cuteness Lexie Coop is just a bridge too far. She has a propensity for
getting knocked up by the wrong guy, and has wound up with a houseful of angelic
children all named after snack foods (after Praline and Brownie, they became too
horrifying to remember). Even when Lexie really hooks up with the wrong guy
and gets severely beaten and brutalized, all it takes is some tearful late-night bonding
with Novalee on the front porch to get her back on the path of living and loving. “We’ve
all got meanness in us, but we’ve all got good in us too,” Novalee pronounces. “And
the good is the only thing that’s worth a damn.”

Maybe I should be grateful that this movie’s Hallmark portrayal of single motherhood
and nonmarital sex is likely to offend moralists of the hard right, but I’m not sure
that’s a good enough reason for such crappy writing and overall shoddy construction.
This is Williams’ first film as a director, and his experience producing sitcoms like
“Roseanne” and “Home Improvement” shows. His individual scenes often seem fine,
in a bright, punchy, cloudlessly superficial way, but he has no sense of how to make a
feature-length narrative stick together. On several occasions, the story makes ungainly
leaps across long stretches of time, leaving the characters — who look completely
unchanged — to tell us that it has been two years since their last conversation or that
Novalee’s infant daughter is suddenly celebrating her fifth birthday.

Characters both kindly and evil pop in and out of the increasingly erratic story like that
troublesome boom mike. “Sister” Husband (Stockard Channing), an earth mother with
a Dodge pickup-cum-covered wagon, dispenses biblical verses and homespun humor,
at least until the tornado hits. Moses Whitecotton (Keith David), the African-American
photographer at Wal-Mart, occasionally shows up like a no-rent Obi-Wan to encourage
Novalee’s professional dreams. And for some reason, the movie occasionally skips out
on Novalee to catch up with her no-account mullet-head ex, Willy Jack (Dylan Bruno),
whose brief country-music career is stage-managed by a conniving Nashville agent
(Joan Cusack, grievously miscast). Then there’s Frain, providing his best Jeff Goldblum
impression as Forney, the stammering geek who carries an obvious torch for Novalee.

By the time Novalee and Forney are finally enveloped in a soft-rock love theme, Willy
Jack has been forced to beg for forgiveness and Lexie has pixied her way to
snack-food baby No. 6, all my initial goodwill toward “Where the Heart Is” had been
exhausted. It’s a soft-focus cartoon in which Wal-Mart is the beneficent community
center for small-town America (I hope the company paid through the nose for its
starring role), clasping unmarried moms to its corporate breast, at least if they’re
gorgeous white chicks. Portman and Judd aren’t responsible for the mendacious and
finally repulsive sentimentality of “Where the Heart Is,” but by the end their
wholesome glow seemed contaminated by it, and that’s a shame.