June 5, 1996

Most of us probly didn’t see James Mangold’s HEAVY in theaters. It won the Special Jury Prize for directing at Sundance, it played Cannes, and then after Liv Tyler got some attention for starring in STEALING BEAUTY it got a limited release in the U.S., starting on one screen in New York and eventually expanding to only 22. I think I only knew about it because Roger Ebert raved about it. I watched it on video later and thought it was pretty good, but I barely remembered it. I thought Heavy was the name of the main guy.

It’s actually Victor Modino, and he’s played by Pruitt Taylor Vince (RED HEAT, K-9, CITY SLICKERS II: THE LEGEND OF CURLY’S GOLD, NATURAL BORN KILLERS) in his first lead role, one he justifiably received alot of praise for. Weirdly this movie didn’t get any Indie Spirit Award nominations, though. Also I’m betting it didn’t ever win any awards for excellence in DVD menu design.

Victor works as the cook at an upstate New York roadside tavern called Pete & Dolly’s. Dolly (Shelley Winters, CLEOPATRA JONES) is his mom, who’s still there, but Pete is long gone. At first she makes it sound like he was just a trucker passing through, but other times it seems like he was there for at least a little while. They have one veteran waitress, Delores (Debbie Harry, DOWNTOWN 81), but Dolly and Delores don’t seem to like each other because Delores slept with Pete at some point. Now she’s sometimes in a relationship with their most loyal regular Leo (Joe Grifasi, BREWSTER’S MILLIONS, BATMAN FOREVER), who pretty much lives there. She kinda gets around, but good for her, honestly. You gotta have something more to do than work at Pete & Dolly’s.

Delores doesn’t seem too happy when Dolly hires college student Callie (Liv Tyler in only her second movie) as an additional waitress, but obviously Victor perks up. I mean, you’ve seen Liv Tyler. He’s a lonely nobody who lives with his mom doing the same job forever, now he’s in close quarters with somebody like that every day, and she’s even nice to him. He can’t control having an unrealistic crush. This makes him self conscious about his weight, but it’s kind of weird that the title is (unless I’m missing some other meaning) related to that. A much bigger obstacle he’d need to overcome is that he just doesn’t know how to talk to people, and it’s not clear if he has a personality. His sentences are rare and often two words or less. He struggles with eye contact. He gets scared of people. His eyes constantly dart back and forth like R.E.M.s. When he’s too close to her they fill up with tears. How would he ever charm anybody, much less Callie?

I’m sure he’s hurt and also unsurprised when he sees that she has a boyfriend named Jeff, and that he’s a jerky, good looking dude who plays guitar and sings (played by Evan Dando of the Lemonheads). Victor lightly invades Callie’s privacy, looking too closely at her pictures with friends, snooping the pregnancy test in her bag, things like that. If it was now you know he’s be closely examining her social media profiles. He definitely thinks about her way more than she thinks about him.

This is sort of a coming-of-age story where a guy in his thirties is inspired to very minimally improve his life partly as a result of being around a beautiful young woman for a while. But first things have to come crashing down, in the form of his mom being hospitalized after a heart attack, and eventually dying. He doesn’t really know what his life is without taking care of his mom, and he’s not that eager to find out.

There’s a scene where Victor gives Callie a ride home for the first time, and I both feel his elation to be in her presence and his pain to know this is probly as far as it could possibly go. But the thing that really struck me is that he has the radio on the call-in advice show he always listens to, and she turns it to music, and gets excited for the song “California Thing” by Freedy Johnston, sings along and talks about the band. He seems startled at first, then smiles at her joyfulness. But he doesn’t know this song, I don’t think he knows any song, he doesn’t know how to share music with her, he can only watch her enjoy it. It’s just a devastating blow of reality to these type of crushes. It almost doesn’t matter that she’s out of his league, or that he doesn’t talk, because if he could, what would they even talk about? How pretty she is? He needs other interests. They have nothing to share.

Well, to be fair she plays cards with him, she talks to him sometimes, he doesn’t seem to otherwise experience that basic type of attention from anybody, let alone someone like her. So by his standards it’s a connection. I like that there are a few times when she’s mean (ignoring his wave when she’s with her boyfriend, cursing out Delores one time) because most of the time she’s a perfect sweetheart. Tyler is really good – seems natural, somehow, even though she dropped down from Heaven into this little roadhouse. Those moments when her flaws show give her humanity.

Maybe the part of the movie that made me the saddest was just wondering what this guy has to do anyway. Callie likes that song, she likes to take photos, she has books in her house, she has friends that she hangs out with, listening to their boyfriends play music, discussing what the songs are about. What does Victor do? He would make breakfast for his mom every day, but that comes to an end. He likes cooking eggs, but not pizzas, which he has to do at work. He walks the dog, but doesn’t seem that attached to him. It could be sad if all he did was sit on the couch and watch TV, but he doesn’t even have that in his life! Just the radio show about relationship stuff he has no context for. We spend the whole movie with this guy and still don’t know much about what he likes to do with his time. Most people would have something! I don’t know if that’s partly an oversight in writing or entirely intentional, but it’s chilling if you think about it too much. I guess I always have too many things I want to do, so those rare times when I have nothing I feel like doing I become very depressed. That seems to be most of Victor’s days.

I want to mention a couple of the scenes that made the biggest impressions on me. In this movie reality sometimes dissolves into weird daydreams – creepy fantasies, really – but some of the oddest parts are presumably real, like the hospital cafeteria encounter with David Patrick Kelly (in his followup to CROOKLYN and THE CROW). He notices Victor being ignored trying to buy a hot dog, and gives him advice and encouragement, which only makes him even more uncomfortable. The guy is a loud mouth with some wisdom. He points out that Victor is “big as an ox, but nobody sees you.” Yes. True.

Another scene that hit me is when Victor comes to the hospital, finds his mom’s room empty, sees her belongings in a plastic bag. The staff are busy with something else and as far as we see he doesn’t even talk to anyone, just leaves. Then the scene where he returns to the tavern vividly captures a specific feeling: he’s been off in his own world, he comes in here and it’s busy, everyone’s talking and working, no one seems to notice him at all, so they don’t acknowledge what he’s been through. He keeps looking at the window where until recently his mom would’ve been, and there’s nobody there.

The most gutwrenching conflict in the movie is that he spends two weeks telling people Dolly is fine – only when Callie asks to come visit her in the hospital with her does he fess up, and even then not with words, but by acting like they’re going to the hospital and then going to the cemetery instead. It’s a rare time when Callie lays into him because what the fuck, Victor.

This stuff is painful because I can relate, and I’m sure many can, to feeling incapable of dealing with regular adult shit you haven’t faced before, and although I’ve gotten better over the years I definitely grew up shy and emotionally repressed. But this is such an extreme version, living an entire life in that helplessness. Is it some sort of neuro-divergence? Did Dolly just raise him that poorly? How did he not learn more shit? He knows how to drive, at least. He could probly plunge a toilet. But how can he not ask questions, not ask for help when the only other choice is to… hide in the back room and scarf down Entemann’s donuts while crying? Actually I know the answer. I understand why he would do that. This movie is so sad.

Another major scene is when he’s hit rock bottom and has kind of trashed the tavern and Callie shows up, maybe partly to check on him but also to get her money and quit. Jeff is with her, and actually comes inside with her, which is notable because earlier Callie told a friend that he had never gone inside, that he considered them trash.

I thought for a moment that this was Jeff’s good side coming out – he’s heard the situation and knows there might be trouble and wants to be with Callie to help if he can. But when he’s the one to discover that Victor is there, ignoring their calls, sitting silently at a table, Jeff can’t even talk directly to him. He calls for Callie, like he’s scared. An interesting reversal. Soon Jeff gets his bearings, though, and starts chewing Victor out about “she’s had to put up with all this bullshit” until she makes him wait outside.

What makes HEAVY special is that it centers a movie on a character like this and shows him so much empathy. But I think looking back with 30 years of hindsight it does end up being too much of a fantasy girl. Even ignoring the part where she lightly kisses him on the lips, the idea that she’s moved by their relationship and not creeped out is a little hard to swallow. Especially after she saw her (stolen) photo on his refrigerator. We know he won’t harm her and I guess she has the wisdom to also know that, but I think in retrospect the “don’t creep women out” lesson is an important one for guys like that to learn. Especially since he’s an older co-worker. Her boss, even.

That’s the one way this seems dated. Mostly it seems timeless, or at least there could’ve been something similar in the ’60s, ‘70s or ‘80s. I didn’t remember that Winters and Harry were going to be in it, and it’s cool how they represent two previous generations of actors and then Tyler and Vince represent the future – meaning they will one day play the Hulk’s girlfriend and Superman’s dad, respectively. These are unassailable breakout performances for both of them and obviously Tyler became a major star while Vince became a sturdy, prolific character actor.

And then there’s Mangold. Of course we all know that he wrote OLIVER & COMPANY and had a story credit on Claymation Easter, but this was his directorial debut. On his DVD commentary track he talks about wanting to go against the grain of the type of indie movies that were popular in the post-RESERVOIR DOGS period, and mentions Ozu as a major influence. Of course, if you’re not trying to be a little cool you probly shouldn’t have a score by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. It’s mostly abstract guitar and feedback sounds, even more minimalistic than Neil Young’s for DEAD MAN. And itt’s interesting that both came out around the same time.

He says the story was inspired by someone he knew of in high school who ran a small diner with his widowed mother, and “there was kind of an intense nobility to their lives at the same time as there was a kind of paralysis to the world they lived in.”

Thirty years later he’s a major filmmaker, but he’s hard to pigeonhole. His second and third movies, COP LAND (1997) and GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1999), seemed like natural progressions for the director of an indie drama breakout. But when he got into Hollywood movies it was KATE & LEOPOLD and IDENTITY?

Now I associate him with his best-of-their-type musician biopics (WALK THE LINE and A COMPLETE UNKNOWN), his western (3:10 TO YUMA), his car movie (FORD V FERRARI), his two comic book movies (THE WOLVERINE and LOGAN) and then he did the only non-Spielberg Indiana Jones movie? That was weird. He’s come a long way from saying on the DVD commentary here that a studio would never let him spend 30 seconds just on smoking a cigarette. But I think that guy is still in him. He still does look for little character moments and things that don’t have to be said in dialogue. Maybe it would be good to strip things down a little, try a small drama again, if he has any interest. (Not HEAVY 2. Although apparently Debbie Harry’s bartender character in COP LAND is named Delores, so there does seem to be a Heavyverse he could return to.)

Okay, of the important-at-the-time indie movies I’ve reviewed in this series, HEAVY never caught on nearly as much as DEAD MAN or WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE. I’m sure some of you never even heard of it and most of you don’t necessarily need to. But if it sounds like something you might like, I recommend checking it out.