Movie Review
Heartland
6/10
TLDR
Shana Feste’s Heartland gives Oscar winner Jessica Chastain a scrappy, melodramatic country noir to sing and scrape her way through. It never quite decides what it wants to be, its twists either come early or out of nowhere, and it ends one song too late, but the music is good.
Where to watch: Streaming on Netflix (November 13)
The Facts
Synopsis: Former country megastar Misty Jones comes out of seclusion to investigate the disappearance of her niece, a rising country musician, and must grapple with her own past and Nashville’s seedy underbelly.
Director: Shana Feste
Stars: Jessica Chastain, John Hawkes, Carter Faith, Garrett Hedlund, Jennifer Nettles, Ross Lynch
Rated: R
Running Length: 112 minutes
The Thoughts
Country music has always loved a comeback story, and Shana Feste’s Heartland hands Oscar winner Jessica Chastain a doozy. She plays Misty Jones, a onetime country megastar and the genre’s reigning queen of mean, who walked away from the spotlight 20 years ago and has been holed up on a pecan farm ever since, until her niece, a rising name in country, goes missing in Nashville. What follows is part amateur-detective noir and part honky-tonk melodrama, and it starts streaming on Netflix on November 13.
It’s been 16 years since Feste wrote and directed Country Strong, a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Garrett Hedlund in a sort of gender-switched, A Star Is Born-ish tale that came and went in theaters but found a nice life on home video, and even more popularity once the TV show Nashville became a hit. This time she heads back to Music City with a mystery to solve, and the film has a scrappy edge to it, but it never decides if it wants to be a hardscrabble, rootin’-tootin’ cowboy mystery or follow the Country Strong path and do some “sangin’” while exposing dark secrets within the industry.
Shana Feste’s Heartland Heads Back to Music City
Misty’s brother (Paul Sparks) is the one who gets her off the farm and back to Nashville to find his daughter, Charlie Heart (Carter Faith). Once she’s back, Misty works her way through a list of suspects that includes Charlie’s sometimes boyfriend, Jace (Ross Lynch), a snotty punk of a country star, and Charlie’s manager, Roy Combs (Hedlund), who helps Misty piece together what happened and where Charlie could be. John Hawkes (The Sessions) turns up as Clark, Misty’s ex, a reminder that the life she ran from is waiting for her right where she left it.
Nobody in town is in much of a hurry to help. As local law enforcement, Hill Harper gives Misty the runaround, and Norbert Leo Butz holds his cards close to his chest. Knowing Charlie’s history of dramatically bailing on her commitments, and of crying wolf about crimes that didn’t happen the way she said, neither of them takes much interest in her disappearance. That is, until a bloody crime scene is discovered, and the investigation turns to Charlie’s known stalker and the possibility that he finally got to her when she was at her most vulnerable.
Chastain Sings, Scraps, and Tussles
Feste certainly knows her country-music-loving audience, casting Jennifer Nettles (of solo recording and Sugarland fame, as well as stage musicals and Harriet) and rising star Faith, in her first film, in pivotal roles, and working again with Hedlund (Inside Llewyn Davis). Chastain roughhouses and tussles like her life depends on it, and she probably gives the role more heaviness than was necessary, weighing down what is already a greatly melodramatic screenplay. Still, you can see what drew her to it, because Misty isn’t interested in being liked, and Chastain never once asks us to.
Chastain did her own singing, just as she did for her Oscar-winning turn in The Eyes of Tammy Faye and as Tammy Wynette in George & Tammy, and she sings fairly sweetly, but the music is where Misty does her real fighting. She expresses her anger more violently at the keys than with her fists, banging out notes on a piano or power-ballading a country tune her character wrote, and when Jace gets too big for his britches, she puts him in his place by outsinging him. She’s not the strongest singer in the bunch, and her title-track duet with legit star Nettles feels like an unfair matchup, especially when Nettles really lets loose, but she more than holds her own, and it sounds authentically her.
Feste fans will also get a kick out of Nettles playing a character named Winnie Jo Lean, since Country Strong had a Winnie of its own, played by Marshall Chapman.
Twists From the Stage
Feste isn’t above throwing in some major twists, either, and she plays by her own set of rules. She reveals one early on, and if you aren’t paying close attention, it may come as a shock. She does it again later, when a character makes a thunderous revelation from the stage, and I was left wondering when we were ever given a clue that it was coming.
That’s the tricky thing about taking Heartland as a mystery: it keeps you on your toes while still playing into your first instinct, so mystery fans will piece most of it together early, and the reveals that do surprise you feel like they came out of nowhere. Nobody here, Misty included, is quite who they seem, and that leaves you with precious little of the cast to side with, when a good noir needs at least one person to root for.
A Netflix homegrown production, Heartland is just a few degrees short of feeling like a real movie that could have made it into theaters, though it plays well on the small screen and will find a more forgiving audience at home than it would have at the multiplex. Cinematographer Khalid Mohtaseb gives Nashville’s honky-tonks and back rooms a dark, neon-tinged look that suits the noir Feste was going for.
And when the mystery sags, the music picks up the slack. Music supervisor Randall Poster (Skyfall, The Wolf of Wall Street), who also produced, built the soundtrack for Heartland, out on Netflix Music the same day, with the cast singing alongside Nashville names like Carly Pearce and Margo Price. The title track is a Hailey Whitters song reworked for Chastain and Nettles, Hawkes duets with Price on “Too Late for Coffee, Too Early for Beer” and with Chastain on “Shouldn’t Have Called,” and Channing Wilson’s “Tall Tall Trees” tips its hat to George Jones and Roger Miller, who wrote it.
One Ending Too Many
It feels like it ends about 20 minutes before it actually does, tacking on ending after ending, including an entire song by Faith that feels like it goes on forever. Still, it’s been a while since we had a movie led by a woman with such conviction, and Heartland is at its best when it simply lets Misty be a complicated, messy woman taking her story back from the town that tried to write it for her. For Feste fans and lovers of the Nashville sound, this one is going to hit the right note, even if the piano itself needs a new coat of paint.
The Final
Heartland is a scrappy, melodramatic country mystery that ends one song too late, but Jessica Chastain plays it with real conviction. For Feste fans and lovers of the Nashville sound, it hits the right note, even if the piano needs a new coat of paint.
6/10
Where to watch: Streaming on Netflix (November 13)
Reviewed by Joe Botten
Joe Botten is The MN Movie Man, a Twin Cities film critic writing spoiler-free reviews since 2012. He also writes for Loud and Clear Reviews, a Rotten Tomatoes approved site. Find him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
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