TEXAS HEART – Review

Review by Mark Longden

One way you can be fairly sure a film didn’t work for you is, when you’ve finished watching it and discover it won an award at a film festival you never heard of, that you then check if the festival is real, or if the director of the movie is the organizer of it. Yes, and no, to those two questions, so I’m really puzzled.

Peter (Erik Fellows) is a sleazy lawyer – we know because he forgot his beautiful girlfriend’s birthday – and he represents the Smith crime family, led by Lin Shaye, who either owed someone a favour or filmed all her scenes in a day. The son of the family is on trial for some crime or other, so they’re going to throw their bookkeeper under the bus for it – only he just discovered he has an incurable cancer and therefore refuses to lie on the stand. This upsets Mrs Smith, so she says, in the middle of open court at a normal volume, “I’m going to kill you”. And her two other sons also threaten him. You know, normal stuff.

So, right at the beginning, TEXAS HEART presents us with a conundrum. Are we supposed to accept this as real? By the way, the bookkeeper, who you’d think would have been told to at least try and look presentable for the court, is unshaven, dishevelled and hasn’t washed his hair in a few weeks. Details, people!

I’m getting sidetracked from the important work of recapping, and we’ve barely begun. So, Peter leaves town, abandoning everything (including his phone, as the Smiths can track it apparently) and winds up pretty much at random in a small Texas town. It says “population 867”, although they filmed in a town much larger than that and it shows whenever they go to a long shot. Pretty much as soon as he turns up, he’s bowled over by the neighbourliness of these people and, calling himself an author who’s trying to finish his latest book, he starts gradually adapting to small-town pace, and makes a few new friends.

Movie history is littered with movies with this sort of premise – the classic fish out of water – but few of them lurch from style to style like “Texas Heart” does. Is it a dark man-on-the-run tale? A light comedy about a man learning to accept the kindness of “real” America? Or a Grisham-style legal thriller? Yes, one of the people he befriends – the slightly “slow” Tiger (Kam Dabrowski) finds himself the subject of a murder trial after the Prom queen, Alison (Daniela Bobadilla),
goes missing, so he has to drop his fake identity and defend his friend. I guess up to that point there was some sort of mild tension about whether the Smiths would find him or not, but him being on the TV news is a bit of a giveaway.

“Texas Heart” is intensely frustrating. It feels like a first draft, or something even less polished than that, as it has all sorts of dropped plot threads and narrative cul-de-sacs and plain old things that make no sense. Let’s go to the bullet-point list!

• No reason or explanation is given as to why he became a nice guy
• Why is the prosecutor so desperate to charge Tiger?
• Why is there a murder trial when she’s been missing for, at best, a few months? Fun fact: the earliest you can declare a missing person dead without a body is 4 years, and it’s 7 in most states.
• Why aren’t the cops investigating the other members of the Smith crime family? Was no-one paying attention when two of them turned up in court to threaten Peter?
• In what universe does a couple of bottles of tequila and a few decent cigars only cost $20?

There are others, but they would be too much of a spoiler to mention here. Although, should you ever watch it, ponder the brain-buggering coincidence of the final scene for a while (and how dumb the few scenes leading up to that were, too – if you’re not shouting “ARREST THEM” at one particular scene, then shame on you).

I’m 100% positive everyone reading this review could have made a more coherent movie than TEXAS HEART. You may notice I’ve not even mentioned the budget, which is undoubtedly small but well-used, or the look of the movie, which is often beautiful and never less than entirely competent. I’ve not criticized the acting either, which despite being a little bit too broad and full of Texas cliches, is fine. I just don’t understand what they were aiming for, at all. When I think of movies that have a bunch of different styles, I think of stuff like “Something Wild”, which at least set up the darkness a little in the middle of the screwball comedy. This just feels like three different scripts starring the same characters were mixed together and the pages used at random.

But, I’ve been wrong many times, and the guy at the LA Times, as well as the several film festivals that gave it awards, have a very different opinion to mine. Everyone involved in it seem like good people with lots of interesting credits under their belts, but…this was just a colossal misfire on pretty much every level.

TEXAS HEART is now available on Amazon (free on Amazon Prime), iTunes, Fandango, Vudu, and most other major digital platforms.  It is alos available on DVD