Hearts in Atlantis (2001)

Scott Hicks's 2001 adaptation of the Stephen King novella arrives with the softness of a remembered summer and the substance of a pressed flower. Anthony Hopkins plays Ted Brautigan, a psychic fugitive hiding in a small New England town, and Anton Yelchin, in his feature debut, plays the lonely boy who reads him the newspaper for a dollar a week. The film is dedicated to its cinematographer, who died before release. It looks lovely. It means well. It asks nothing of us.

The cultural ledger here is close to blank, and the few entries that exist are unflattering. The cast is uniformly white, and the screenplay never turns its head toward race, class, or the wider currents of the decade it depicts. Nixon appears on a television; he is furniture, not argument. The town bully is undone when Ted reads his mind and finds a secret taste for women's clothing, which the film treats as a shameful wound to be exposed and exploited. The widowed mother, played by Hope Davis with a fine, brittle edge, is written as vain and neglectful, and her offscreen assault functions as a mechanism for her misjudgment. That is the sum of the film's engagement with women, and it is not an engagement at all. There is no economic critique, no environmental concern, no interest in bodies or minds as sites of dignity. Ted's abilities are supernatural, not a portrait of anything.

What keeps the picture watchable is its refusal to sermonize. It is an elegy, not a lesson, and it never pauses to instruct the audience on how to feel or whom to pity. The 1960s here are nostalgia, baseball and Ferris wheels and wind chimes, with no revisionist ambition. By the standards of the current cultural moment, the film is a museum piece, well acted, beautifully shot, and almost entirely free of the progressive signifiers that now decorate the release calendar. A sommelier might call it a vintage with no tannin and no finish. Pleasant. Forgettable. Categorically quiet.