Blowing air against the windowpane, drawing the number into the moisture, Bobby Garfield can think only of turning 11 and receiving the ideal bike. Little does he realize that this summer will transform his life - soon he will leave lazy days behind along with his childhood.
As though peering through the prism that reappears throughout the movie, Bobby cannot quite make out the future lying before him. Unfortunately for "Hearts in Atlantis," neither can the movie's viewers. More than anything, the film leaves viewers confused and struggling to find answers to the movie's psychological questions.
Waking up on his 11th birthday and greeted by the gift of an adult library card (discernibly not a bike), Bobby Garfield (Anton Yelchin) knows enough about life to take things as they come. His self-centered mother Liz (Hope Davis) encapsulates the impossibilities of his childhood.
Burdened by her status as a working widow in a time when only 2 percent of her age group was unmarried, Mrs. Garfield falls to bitterness. Bobby has learned, through the past six years , simply to listen and nod as she berates money, his father and life in a small town.
On this day of days, however, Ted Brautigan (Anthony Hopkins) arrives as a tenant for the upstairs apartment. Too old to be a peer, equipped only with newspapers, Chesterfields and Root Beer, Ted embodies for Bobby a friend and a father. Not only that, he offers Bobby the greatest boon for an 11-year-old kid: a job.
Hired to read the newspaper aloud every day in exchange for a dollar per week, Bobby takes on the greater responsibility of watching out for "low men" - low in the Dickensian sense, meaning base or animalistic. His confusion parallels that of viewers as they struggle to understand the gift, or burden, that restrains Brautigan from a normal existence.
Brautigan is defined, on the most literal level, as a psychic, a man capable of reading the thoughts of others. And he is this, as viewers realize when he receives premonitions of the summer's last chilling scenes. The confusion for viewers - and for Bobby - lies within the belief in the low men that follow Brautigan, in the idea that some evil force could exist in a sleepy town in the 1950s. Neither Brautigan nor the film itself is ever able to answer this question properly enough.
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Part of the film's stunning psychological beauty rests on the premise of confusion, and this is derived in large part from Stephen King's novel "Hearts In Atlantis." The novel itself ends unresolved, even more so than the movie. Brautigan's abilities remain unexplained, as does the identity of the men searching for him.
While the movie inserts a scene about J. Edgar Hoover's use of psychics, the novel explores possibilities of Brautigan's role in another space and time. Regardless of the probing questions and the beauty in which such scenes are enacted, the ending remains stubbornly deceptive.
Although he embodies a character beyond earthly description, Anthony Hopkins is flawless in the part of Brautigan. Citing endless quotations of English writers with the air of a scholar, he yet retains his edge, the fear that dominates the performance. Hopkins is mesmerizing as he meshes the boundary between reality and horror.
While frightened enough to sense the low men "at the back of his eyes," Hopkins enables Brautigan to feel enough hope to insist on the education of his young protege. The suspense, as viewers are caught between immense fear and the simplest aspects of daily life, is captivating. Yet the audience has no sense of why they are even caught up in this plot; the confusion is continually overwhelming.
Stunningly staged and filmed by director Scott Hicks of "Shine" and the visionary late photographer Piotr Sobocinski, the movie becomes embodied by the evanescent details of a young boy's life alongside such immense terror. A first kiss on a Ferris wheel (one to which all later kisses will be compared and found lacking), afternoons spent slung across trees in a ravine or walking slowly across the trestles of a railroad track - all such carefree moments slowly fade away and become somehow surreal. As Brautigan articulates eloquently, there are some moments in childhood that are so happy, they seem to reflect the fantasy that must have been Atlantis.
Caught in a spell that is never entirely believable, viewers at least recognize this undeniable fact: Childhood disappears, and with it, the moments that seem to linger forever. An older Bobby (David Morse) recalls the memories - and perhaps even the confusion - and notes only that they must all be cherished as they come; every moment becomes part of the whole, and nothing can ever be regretted.
Of course, this is an admirable moral and a neat closing to a beautifully shot, entrancing film. Although mesmerized by the film's psychological horror, intense beauty and incredible acting, viewers can never entirely come to terms with their uncertainties.
Confused and humbled, viewers can appreciate the stunning quality and acting of the film itself; the plot slips by largely misunderstood. They leave the theater uneasy about the forces that life contains, questioning the horror, and quite sure that they themselves have left their perplexed hearts behind in Atlantis.
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