Heart

Christopher Eccleston - Gary
Saskia Reeves - Maria
Kate Hardie - Tess
Rhys Ifans - Scriptwriter
Simon Molloy - Judge

Few would deny that Jimmy McGovern is one of Britain’s most powerful television writers, not least for bringing a social conscience to the whodunit genre with the TV series Cracker. Though his only previous cinematic excursion, the Antonia Bird-directed Priest, was better suited to the small screen, its heart was in the right place. This, ironically, doesn't appear to have one.

A domestic thriller, it concerns Gary (Eccleston), a pilot who suffers a jealousy induced heart attack due to the philandering of his TV producer wife (Hardie) and a foul-mouthed young scriptwriter (Twin Town's excellent Rhys Ifans). A subsequent heart transplant shown in gruesome, brightly-lit, surgical close-up - rescues both man and marriage, or so Gary thinks. He unwisely seeks out the psychotic woman (Reeves) whose dead son's heart saved his life, narrative dominoes tumble, and four-way violence ensues. Given that all this is in a flashback and the film opens with a dazed, blood-caked Reeves clutching a heart in a paper bag, the intrigue lies only in the how and why. Can you guess whose it is yet?

Heart is a conventional, Hollywood influenced schlock dressed as something more profound and authentic, betrayed by cheap puns in the script ("I've had a change of heart") and in the soundtrack (Dusty Springfield's Anyone Who Had A Heart, schoolchildren singing "Give me joy in my heart"). The action relies on brutality for its dramatic shocks - something Cracker (which McDougall also directed) always skilfully side-stepped -while Eccleston appears unconvinced, Hardie is chiefly there to have copious sex, and Reeves does an awful lot of staring. Meanwhile, McGovern is too busy building in "McGovernisms" (old man singing in the pub; incest; Hail Marys) to notice that his plot is leaking.

Two distinctive gags salvage his reputation (one involving a jobsworth ticket collector) but a TV audience would have turned over by then.
Andrew Collins.