Directors: Kirk Wahamaki and Leslye Witt
Writer: Roger Rapaport
Cast: Edward Gaines, Jamelle Sargent and Eva Doueiri
Running time: 90mins
Old Heart is the third iteration of a work of art. The film is based on a stage adaptation of a novel of the same name by the American writer Peter Ferry. The directors of the stage play, Kirk Wahamaki and Leslye Witt, co-directed the movie.
The directors give us the story of Tom Johnson, a retired teacher from Detroit. As the movie opens, Tom, an eighty-five-year-old widower, is about to leave the family home and move into assisted living accommodation arranged by his children. The year is 2005. Tom then does something extraordinary – he takes a taxi, gets on a plane to Amsterdam then boards a train to a small town in the Netherlands.
As the narrative develops, we learn the reasoning behind Tom’s adventure. Tom, a black American, as a teenager in the US army, was part of the only desegregated unit in the US forces in World War II – the Red Ball Express. Tom was a driver in the unit which was charged with supplying the US troops invading the Nazi occupied Netherlands and getting in food to the starving civilian population. Tom met and fell in love with Sarah, a local woman. Sarah, who was Jewish had been hidden on a farm throughout the Nazi terror, worked as Tom’s translator and undertook dangerous missions getting supplies to civilians behind the retreating Germans’ lines. For reasons, only brought to light later in the movie, Tom lost touch with Sarah – went back to the US, got married and started a family. First love lost. We gradually realise the purpose of Tom’s journey – it is a quixotic quest to find Sarah.
Tom settles down to small town Dutch life. He rents a room. He makes friends with a Canadian WWII veteran. He engages a lawyer to help him in his search for Sarah. He becomes so enamoured of life in the Netherlands that he applies for residency – a move that is vehemently opposed by his children back in the US. As for how the search for Sarah went and whether Tom stayed in Europe, the filmmakers provide the answers in a compelling narrative which I found moving and, crucially, believable.
Tom’s story is in the original sense of the word – fabulous. Wahamaki and Witt have filmed a fable – a story with a moral purpose. The metanarrative we are asked to consider has two edges. The agency of older people – their ability to make their own decisions on how to live their lives. The historic racism within US society that led the state to wage World War II with armed forces segregated according to race.
The structure of Old Heart is well thought out. The film is almost equally divided between footage of Tom in the present and Tom and Sarah back in 1944. The 1944 scenes are in black and white, and the period detail is spot on. One reference that pleasantly surprised me was that a young woman in the 1940s Netherlands would have been a fan of the American poet Langston Hughes.
The filmmakers do not overreach themselves – we just have close up conversational situations with only Tom and Sarah present. Here, Wahamaki and Will are helped by powerful performances from Jamelle Sargent as the young Tom and Eva Doueiri as the young Sarah.
As a narrative device, the interchange between past and present works excellently – we come to understand the tragic circumstances that took Tom away from Sarah. Equally fine in terms of exposition is Tom’s interactions in the present – again this is aided by a strong performance by Edward Gaines as the older Tom. Here, two narrative devices work particularly well. Tom’s visits to see the lawyer delineate the question of older people’s power over decision making efficiently. Tom also sets up a series of chess games in a park with his new- found friend – the Canadian vet. In leisurely conversation over the chess moves, Tom outlines to the vet, and to us the audience, the issues around racism that he encountered in his wartime experience – a wonderful piece of cinema.
I must mention the quality of the screenplay by Roger Rapoport. I would rate the work highly – a fine job in imparting such a vast amount of information without coming across as overly didactic whilst moving the plot development along deftly. A declaration of interest. Roger has submitted several films to IFL in the past and we have corresponded about his different projects – I have always been impressed by his fertile imagination and protean approach to filmmaking. However, trust your reviewer – hopefully the connection has not affected my judgement on the work at hand.
Old Heart looks good. The cinematography led by David Darling is excellent. The editing by Gene Gamache is first class – the temporal transition from the colour of the present to the monochrome of the past is seamless. There is a subtle and rather beautiful moment near the climax of the movie where for a single frame we see the young Tom and the young Sarah when the convention changes and we see them in full colour – very well achieved.
However, some of the choices that Wahamaki and Witt make do not come off.
The directors, having chosen to tell the story as a fable, go at it, full-bore. They portray the Netherlands as an idyllic welcoming haven where the sun always shines – apparently there are never grey skies or rain. Because of the power of Gaines’ performance and the drive of the narrative – we can mostly suspend our disbelief. However, the fairy tale atmosphere does tend to grate after a while – I would suspect, particularly, for a North European audience. I kept imagining the spectres of Geert Wilders and Zwarte Piet blocking out the dappled sunshine.
I do not know whether Wahamaki and Witt went with the cast from the theatre production but some of the support actors put in quite woeful performances which undermine the credibility of the movie as a whole.
There is a particularly gruesome scene played out at the Dutch immigration tribunal where we meet a supposedly very successful immigration lawyer opposing Tom’s application. The actor brings to the role all the modalities of say a hyper caffeinated Al Pacino playing Richard III – supremely, ludicrously over the top. Thinking of the weld between the warm medium of theatre and the cooler medium of cinema – possibly the scene worked on the stage. However, for the more forensic take of a cinema audience, it came across as simply laughable. A pity as the scene undermined the work of the main players and became one of my abiding memories from the film.
Despite these problems, Old Heart is a worthy effort – very much a movie of our times. I took it as a liberal American attempt to connect the present to a heroic past where moral decisions were as – in the recreated footage – black and white. All the while, mediated by a saintly, all-American hero.
It was ever thus. I remember in the 1970s (yes, I go back that far) at the height of the Vietnam War reading Barbara Tuchman’s biography of Joe Stilwell, Sand Against The Wind. Stilwell was the US general in World War II who tried to bring a hint of liberal democracy to the corrupt Chinese military dictatorship that America was allied to in the fight against Japan. Tuchman’s superb work should be read as an allegorical take on the contemporary horror of the US intervention in Vietnam. Similarly, looking to a past of moral certainty against the flux and moral turpitude of Trumpian America is very much the ethos of Old Heart.
And yes, for an old liberal softie such as myself – Old Heart really does work. Just before the final credits roll, there is a dedication of the film to all those who lost their lives in the Netherlands during the Hitler tyranny. The moment brought tears to my eyes. The figures are astounding – the number of civilians who died of starvation was staggering. The script stays the same but the location changes.
Wahamaki and Witt are part of what seems to be a vibrant artistic community up in Michigan. I hope they continue to make movies and that the community continues to thrive despite the best efforts of the sociopathic man baby in the White House and his war on science and the liberal arts.