The Heart of Justice

Very much a TV movie with all the hallmarks to prove it. How a project like this got Dennis Hopper, Jennifer Connelly, Vincent Price & William H. Macy to appear in it is most peculiar. Only Connelly has any real screen time but the movie mostly follows Eric Stoltz as quite possibly one of the most annoyingly grating characters ever put to film. How anyone is meant to root for him the way he treats his girlfriend and colleagues makes no sense. A very forgettable 90s tv movie which should probably be left there.

1992's "The Heart of Justice" was a prestigious TV movie from Turner Network Television, boasting a solid cast of veterans in mostly brief appearances, led in the opening scene by Dennis Hopper and Vincent Price, two longtime friends enjoying a last luncheon together in their exclusive club before Hopper's Austin Blair is unceremoniously shot to death once he leaves. The assassin is Elliot Burgess (Dermot Mulroney), an introverted violinist who has formed an unusually close bond with gorgeous sister Emma (Jennifer Connelly), one that dirtbag Blair seemingly knows about and has revealed all the skeletons in the Burgess family closet in his latest work of gossip fiction. Hot shot reporter David Leader (Eric Stoltz) is given the green light to compose a series of articles designed to leave the other newspapers envious, using his contacts to dig further into the background of the Burgess patriarch (Bradford Dillman), who always wanted his pampered son to follow in his law practice footsteps. Only after making contact with Emma does David receive a number of cassette tapes narrated by the obviously deranged killer, all spelling out the motives behind the murder, drawn out over several weeks in a coldly calculated style. It doesn't really qualify as a mystery since the crime takes place barely two minutes into the picture (even before the credits roll!), and because the protagonist is a self serving jerk deserving of less pity than even the perpetrator, viewers are left with an exercise of style over substance, less and less involving as the picture drags on toward its painfully obvious conclusion. What one is left with are the little character vignettes, in particular the final screen role for 80 year old Vincent Price (shooting in October 1991), whose Reggie Shaw describes himself as 'a charming old fart' who enjoys time spent with old friends, and whose real life relationship with Dennis Hopper makes their sequence stand out; both had first worked together in 1956 on the Irwin Allen production "The Story of Mankind," and had recently reunited for Hopper's directorial outing "Backtrack" aka "Catchfire" (oddly enough, this would also prove the last feature role for Bradford Dillman, spending his final three decades in blissful retirement).

This is a dark and moody movie that has a couple of things going for it and one big weakness. The things going for it include the acting. Everyone is at least pretty good, down to the smallest parts. Dermot Mulroney is often an unbelievable pain in the neck but here, as a murderously paranoid schizophrenic, his wooden wariness and immobile face are convincing. Dennis Hopper, as Truman Capote or Dominick Dunne or somebody, has a relatively small part, but he has become a reliable and always interesting supporting actor, now that he has survived the 1960s. Eric Stoltz looks the part, red haired and pale, and quick in his movements and in this particular role his voice, which is sometimes a hindrance to our suspension of disbelief, hints at an underlying weakness of character that plays to advantage. Brad Dillman, as the head of the terribly rich and rather warped family, is also quite good, almost unrecognizable as the same guy who was a homosexual genius in "Compulsion." Best of all is Jennifer Connelly as the mysterious sister of Mulroney. She always wears black, right down to her skivvies. Okay, she has the voice and intonations of a high school girl -- but what a high school girl! The voice is always semi-breathless and as deliberate and slow as her most molecular movements or her most molar for that matter. It isn't clear from the film that she was sexually involved with her brother but they were surely bonded. What a delight to look at.

Oh -- the big weakness. Alright. As they say, "Even paranoids have enemies." And in this case, Mulroney's beliefs about Dennis Hopper's writing a scandalous number on the family were evidently correct. Hopper was collecting secret information in the form of gossip and so forth. Stoltz is a successful reporter who begins nosing into the case and finding that, yes, maybe Mulroney was right. But where was Hopper getting his dish from? Jennifer Connelly confesses that it was she who was Hopper's informant. She seduces Stoltz and more or less coerces him into destroying all of his evidence about the case. Having succeeded in quashing the story Stoltz was pursuing, she abandons Stoltz.

The holes in the reasoning gape before us. If she wanted the true story quashed, why did she inform on the family in the first place? The question undermines the entire plot. Almost as bad: Stoltz has quit his job at the paper, and the job has been taken over by Macy. In the last scene, she taunts Macy by revealing her half-naked body to him from a soft-pornly curtained window, and Macy moves toward the building with an expression of what is presumably supposed to be deep desire. Da spider iss spinnink her wep fawh anodder unvary fly! But -- WHY? The scandalous story is now kaput. She should have no interest in Stoltz's replacement at the paper, nor he in her -- he knows practically nothing about Stoltz' work.

The performances and the moody atmosphere are enough to carry this film over the abbysal gaps in the plot, but they provide pretty shaky support.

Meandering tale of a wealthy family embroiled in a murder scandal with hot shot reporter Stoltz becoming enamoured by the sultry, enigmatic daughter (Connelly) in his obsessive pursuit of landing the big scoop to feed his ambitions of fame and fortune.

Tries for a film noir feel, but doesn't make the grade wasting a whole lot of talent in the process. Most of star-billed Hopper's role is seen in flashbacks, whilst fellow veterans Price and Dillman have only relatively small contributions to a rather muddled mystery. I preferred the Stoltz-Connelly mind games that were maturing, alas they were overtaken midway by Mulroney's bizarre social handicap whose delusional behaviour becomes progressively more paranoid as the climax approaches.

But despite the potential, the movie is really no more than a feature-length episode of a Murder She Wrote or similar whodunit, with too much telegraphed and consequently, very few surprises to entertain any armchair sleuth who might be hoping for something more mysterious.

A writer is murdered out in the open, and the killer then offs himself. The question is what happened? The man he killed wrote something scandalous about his family. The man was ticked off by his latest book. He was so unhinged. His sister was shocked by his behavior. So when he stalked him, he caught the interest in a reporter. So the reporter got closer to his sister.

It's a interesting movie to watch. With an all-star cast to boot. It's like a puzzle game to solve, but it's also a game of cat and mouse. With the puzzle been solved, but the game of cat and mouse results with the mouse getting away.

Eric Stoltz, Jennifer Connelly, William H. Macy makes the movie good. It's a shame that it was Vincent Price's last film.

3 out of 5 stars.