Skip it. Jessica Chastain is doing genuine, considered work in Heartland, the kind of performance that usually earns a better film around it, and the film around it has no pulse to speak of. David Rooney’s one-word verdict in The Hollywood Reporter is “Dullsville,” offered after he admits he needed the press notes to learn this was supposed to be a “gritty neo-noir thriller” (“Sure, Jan,” he replies, and he is not wrong). The Guardian’s Adrian Horton lands in the same neighborhood with better manners, calling it “more miss than hit.” It streams on Netflix, included with a subscription, rated R, and runs an hour and 53 minutes.
Chastain plays Misty Jones, a country legend who walked away from Nashville twenty years ago and now lives on a remote Georgia pecan farm with a handful of decrepit dogs for company (the kind of hideout the genre always hands its flawed detectives, right down to the overgrown porch). Her brother Donny (Paul Sparks) calls with news that his daughter Charlie (Carter Faith), a rising country star, has stopped answering her phone while his wife fights cancer. The family sends the aunt nobody speaks to, and the disappearance plot, the murder plot, the obsessive stalker and the eventual shootout all follow from there without ever raising the temperature.
Writer-director Shana Feste had a real idea here. “I’m a huge film noir fan, and I think I was always really inspired by the hard-boiled detective character that was played by Humphrey Bogart,” she told Netflix’s Tudum, describing a plan to hand that role to a difficult, flawed woman instead of writing yet another backstage drama. It is a good pitch. The film that resulted needed its own marketing copy to be recognized as noir, which is the kind of gap between intention and execution that no amount of atmospheric lighting closes.
The one place Heartland comes fully alive is Chastain’s voice. She was coached in vocals, piano and guitar for the role and does all her own singing, and rather than arrive polished, she deliberately keeps the rust on. “I wasn’t making Misty sound perfect because she’s someone who hasn’t performed in years,” she said, and that choice pays off hardest in the stage number Feste built the whole film around, the one she hoped would let “every woman over 40 … watching at home” feel the satisfaction of besting some young, ego-filled show-off onstage. Jennifer Nettles, playing fellow singer Winnie Jo Lean, brings real pipes to the picture too, and Variety’s Guy Lodge singles out her onstage duet with Chastain on the title track as the highlight of the song score.
The rest of the soundtrack doesn’t reach that peak. Lodge all but says so himself by calling the duet the one standout, which leaves the other fourteen tracks, including songs from Margo Price, Carly Pearce and Carter Faith’s own “Still the Sparrow Sings,” as competent set dressing rather than anything that lingers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv8agst9o_0
A movie that can generate that much charge from a duet has no excuse for generating none from its mystery, and that is where Heartland goes slack for good. Guy Lodge in Variety notes the villains are “glaringly identifiable as such from the get-go,” and Horton makes much the same point without the quote, saying the film aims for the southern gothic chill of HBO’s Sharp Objects and settles for something far more generic. William Bibbiani at TheWrap is the honest dissent worth noting, calling it a smart detective story shaped well by its setting, though even he flags the ADR patches where exposition gets dropped in from off camera, the sound of a film finished in a hurry rather than built with care.
The better movie keeps surfacing in pieces anyway. ScreenRant’s Alex Harrison names the long confrontation between Misty and her ex-husband Clark (John Hawkes) the best scene in the film, and puts the whole review in one line worth repeating: “There’s a really good drama somewhere in Jessica Chastain’s country music thriller, but Heartland buries it underneath a rote mystery story.” Lodge’s suggestion that Misty is loosely drawn from Bobbie Gentry, the Nashville songwriter who walked away from fame at its peak and stayed gone, points toward a sharper character study the film glances at and then abandons for plot.
Feste made this same city her subject sixteen years ago in Country Strong, with Garrett Hedlund (here playing label boss Roy Combs) in the cast then too. That film drew mixed reviews and $20.6 million, and still produced an Oscar-nominated song in “Coming Home.” Heartland has the deeper bench, songwriters like Hillary Lindsey and Charles Wesley Godwin, performers like Margo Price and Carly Pearce, and no single song here lands with that kind of force. More resources, less grip, which about sums up the sixteen years between them.
Chastain completists will get what they came for, and anyone with a soft spot for Nashville texture will take real pleasure from the Bluebird Cafe scenes and the dive-bar numbers, one of the rare places a Netflix drama earns its sense of place instead of asserting it. Anyone sold a mystery, or hoping for the Sharp Objects version of this story, will be bored inside twenty minutes and stay there. It is the same shape of letdown that showed up this month in Wild Horse Nine and I Play Rocky, strong lead work with no film underneath it worth the trip.
The verdict stands: skip it, with the one qualification that none of the waste belongs to its star. Chastain built a whole person here and got handed a plot instead of a movie to put her in.
