HEAVY (1995)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
(original review from 1996 screening)
"Heavy" is the most refreshingly unsentimental and most heartbreaking portrait of small-town life I have ever seen. Forget "Nobody's Fool" or the slew of feel-good movies patterned after it - this is the real article. At its center is the remarkably mute performance by Pruitt Taylor Vince - a performance you're not likely to forget. It's "Marty" meets Ernest Hemingway.
Pruitt Taylor Vince plays a balding, shy, reticent heavy-set man named Victor who works as a pizza cook at his mother's depressing tavern, Pete and Dolly's in Upstate New York. Shelley Winters plays the mother, Dolly, who owns the tavern, and dotes on her son for cooking breakfast for her every morning. Victor lives with his mother in an equally depressing house with cracked white walls and an insistent little mutt for a pet. Once in a while, a regular, inebriated customer (Joe Grifasi) sleeps over their house. Sometimes, a trashy waitress (Deborah Harry) takes him in. Nothing here is suggestive of an exciting life - it's time that Victor leave for a more comforting environment, but where?
Suddenly, a savior seems to come into town in the form of a bright angel named Callie (Liv Tyler) who becomes the new waitress at the tavern. Victor is immediately smitten, but is unable to vocalize his affections. He notices that Callie has a guitarist boyfriend (Evan Dando) who disapproves of her workplace and the people that inhabit it. However, she doesn't seem happy in her relationship or with drifting around from one small town to another. She does take comfort in Victor, and they take photographs of each other and play solitaire. Victor realizes he can't have her because of his weight, and becomes self-conscious.
We suspect from the beginning that Dolly doesn't want her son to consort with outsiders, much less someone like the voluptuous Callie. She tells her son, at one point, "You're not fat. You're husky. Well-built." The older, slutty waitress sees Callie as a threat and tries, in one beautiful scene at an airport, to kiss the reluctant Victor. But all Victor wants is to go to the local cooking college and stay with Callie.
"Heavy" is not a typical family drama, or a made-for-TV-movie about a shy man who learns to love life again and possibly end up with the girl at the end. "Heavy," as written and directed by first-time director James Mangold, has a stately, controlled pace with well-developed characters whom we see against a dreary, hopeless backdrop. There are no easy resolutions, or needlessly uncomplicated characters - the movie strives to make you see the world that surrounds Victor and all that he has left in it.
Pruitt Taylor Vince, a journeyman character actor, is convincingly reticent as Victor, a man who doesn't say much and envisions himself as a savior and hero in his metaphoric rescue attempt to save Callie. The film becomes uncomfortable to watch after a while because of Victor's silence - it is like watching a silent movie about a repressed man. Shelley Winters is wonderfully restrained as the bright Dolly who misses her late husband Pete, a trucker. Deborah Harry brings depth to her waitress character without including the usual stereotypical tics; a woman who's been in the same place for far too long. The biggest flaw is Evan Dando as the boyfriend (a shallow man, too) - Dando is not an actor, just an annoyance, and I would have preferred a more charismatic actor for an essentially undefined role.
"Heavy" is not for all tastes, but it is an intelligent character study about a lonely man who can't communicate in a desperate lonely, uncommunicative town.
