1989's Heart of Dixie Tries to Tell a Black Story with Almost No Actual Black Characters
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When people whine about the horrors of multiculturalism, diversity, identity politics and the over-representation of people of color and the LGTBQ community in entertainment, it makes me laugh.
I laugh long and I laugh hard. I point at the computer where the snowflake is complaining and chortle, “Ha ha!” Nelson Muntz-style to illustrate that I think that what they’re saying is stupid and wrong.
That’s because I am a grown-ass man of forty-six who is all too familiar with movies like 1989’s Heart of Dixie. It’s a seemingly well-intended but ultimately woefully misguided message movie that answers the distressingly oft-asked question, “Can you make a movie about anti-black racism that does not feature even a single black character?” with a frustrated, “No, but you sure can try!”
It would be an exaggeration to say that there are no black characters in this poorly received adaptation of Anne Rivers Siddons’ 1976 novel Heartbreak Hotel. But director Martin Davidson and screenwriter Tom McCown almost completely remove black people and black voices from a black story and foreground a nice white lady who learns about racism so she writes an article about how it’s bad.
In a Golden Raspberry-nominated performance Ally Sheedy plays Maggie DeLoach, the aforementioned nice white lady. She’s a sorority sister in 1957 Alabama who enjoys a pampered life of privilege in the racist Deep South whose conscience is awoken by the discovery that African-Americans in 1950s Alabama were treated poorly.
This leads her to write a nice article about how she thinks racism is bad. Black people are dying and suffering and fighting a ferocious battle for dignity and freedom but it should be noted that the article that Maggie writes is really well-written and sincere and reflects that, now that’s she’s really had a chance to think about it, racism is really not good and something that, honestly, we should all be against, even white people.
It’s a heroic arc that will resonate will every bold soul who ever witnessed an injustice, stood up tall and said, “I’m going to write an article about that for the paper expressing my opinion” and then did just that.
Virginia Madsen, working again with Long Gone director Martin Davidson and Long Gone cinematographer Robert Elswit, who would go on to win an Academy Award for There Will Be Blood, one of six collaborations with Paul Thomas Anderson, plays Delia June Curry, the sorority’s sultry vixen while the prominently billed Phoebe Cates is barely in the movie as the resident free-thinker, a beatnik type who pretty much disappears for forty minutes, then returns to announce that she’s pregnant.
Perhaps because it was adapted from a novel, Heart of Dixie is full of characters who seem like they’ll play a major role in the proceedings and then just sort of vanish. I suspect that they played much bigger roles in Siddons’ novel but became unfortunate casualties of Heart of Dixie’s need to tell one story poorly instead of being a true ensemble film.
The role of a sad-eyed, simultaneously strong and fragile beauty in full control of her ripe sexuality yet more than a little lost is squarely within Madsen’s wheelhouse. She specializes in playing damaged sexpots with complicated interior lives and when she’s given anything to do, Madsen is characteristically extraordinary.
In a standout scene Delia and her segregation-loving preppie pals go to a roadhouse where the appearances-minded sorority girl can’t resist the sleazy, sweaty charm of a middle-aged greaser who makes his amorous intentions know with each leering look.
It’s a moment charged with sexuality, ambiguity and an unmistakable element of danger. Delia knows that she shouldn’t court trouble and antagonize her perfectly respectable upper-crust boyfriend but she can’t help herself.
Unfortunately this scene is the exception that proves the rule. Heart of Dixie is wildly melodramatic alright, as well as florid, overwrought and cartoonishly Southern but it lacks the nuance and intensity of that standout sequence.
Madsen is once again the best part of the film but she wanders away just like everyone else does, to the film’s eternal detriment. Treat Williams also just sort of wanders away as sexy older photographer Hoyt Cunningham, who shares with Delia a painful truth she was previously unaware of: racism exists in 1957 Alabama and makes the lives of African-Americans difficult.
Our pure-hearted heroine is deeply moved by this revelation. It causes her to look askance at all of the n bombs her friends drop freely and boy oh boy are they free with their racist slurs. There is no easier, clearer or more succinct way to establish that a character is a racist piece of shit you should not feel an iota of sympathy towards than putting putting the n word in their mouths.
Heart of Dixie looks absolutely fantastic. It is a film of beautiful surfaces, a lush fever dream of retro Southern glamour shot by one of the great cinematographers. Even Elswit can’t make this material cinematic however.
If Long Gone was a TV movie that felt like a theatrical film Heart of Dixie feels like the antithesis, a theatrical film that feels like a TV movie. Heart of Dixie is a big screen soap opera with a small screen mindset that wouldn’t feel out of place as a feature-length pilot for a nighttime soap opera. All that’s missing are commercials for Designing Women every twenty minutes.
The kind of quaint, old-fashioned, terminally white movie about racism they shouldn’t make anymore, Heart of Dixie had nothing to say about racism at the time of its release. It has even less to say now.
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