Absurd end makes love story just a fling
Going into “The Violent Heart,” you must understand that the ending is insanely ridiculous. This is not to say that it’s not entertaining — in a way, it’s even more entertaining for being insanely ridiculous. But by the end, you will in no way be able to regard “The Violent Heart” as anything resembling a serious movie.
Yet a lot of what comes before is not bad at all. There’s some clumsiness in the screenplay, but the performances are good — often better than they have to be. There are subtleties and complexities of emotion, expressed between the lines, that we don’t expect. Kerem Sanga wrote and directed, and for his next feature, he should definitely direct, but he might consider farming out the writing to any random person on the street.
“The Violent Heart,” available on video on demand starting Friday, Feb. 19, is a combination love story/thriller about a 24yearold Black man and an 18yearold white woman who is still in high school. Though the movie is being billed as a modernday “Romeo and Juliet” story, race is not an overt obstacle to their getting together. To the extent race enters the mix at all, it’s in the background — detectable in an occasional look of wariness that crosses the young man’s eyes.
His wariness is the product of having already experienced tragedy. When he was 9, he watched his sister get murdered by an unknown assailant. He also has a police record, for beating up a guy in a fight he didn’t start. So for young Daniel (Jovan Adepo), the world has not been a friendly place, while Cassie (Grace Van Patten), who doesn’t know better, thinks the world belongs to her.
Throughout, Van Patten has to wrestle with a certain weakness in Cassie’s characterization, but especially at the start. The first getting-toknow-you conversation between Cassie and Daniel is a disaster of bad writing, and yet it’s intended to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of establishing their immediate bond. The problem is that Cassie is conceived of as an amalgamation of cliches — nerd, daddy’s girl, oblivious temptress, bland nice person.
It’s only when Cassie’s sexual passion is ignited that Van Patten’s performance comes alive, and then “The Violent Heart” gets interesting: She sees no limits and has none, while he has the burden of his family’s expectations and the pressure of having to find a career. He looks at her with warmth and uneasiness, while she has the perky, tempestuous energy of someone who could get a guy into serious trouble.
Both romantic leads are as strong as the screenplay allows them to be, which is strong enough to make us care about them, even as the movie falls apart. Mary J. Blige brings the weight of painful life experience to her role as Daniel’s mother, and Lukas Haas at least has fun playing Cassie’s father, a role that makes so little sense you may still be laughing about it a day later.
So, this is what they call “a mixed review,” and yet if you think of “The Violent Heart,” not as a movie, but as a calling card, it’s promising. It announces Van Patten and Adepo as talents to watch, and Sanga as a director of ability — just so long as he resists the impulse to write.