Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.

Anthony Hopkins plays Ted Brautigan, a man wanted for his psychic prowess, in "Hearts in Atlantis." The film opens in theaters today.

Friday September 28, 2001

Grade:

A

There's something immediately intriguing about a film adapted from a Stephen King story by the screenwriter of "The Princess Bride."

The result should be something sweet and supernatural, something nostalgic for the old world of daydreams still sleeping inside us, the one we're just waiting to remember.

King can be unsettlingly freakish, but he can also help audiences reconnect with the little explosions of fear and jubilation they felt in childhood. Who better to usher those visions into the realm of film than William Goldman, the creator of Rodents Of Unusual Size?

Fortunately, "Hearts in Atlantis," which opens tonight, ascends to such lofty expectations gracefully, and actually - believe it or not - captivates audiences.

Yes, fear not you who have paid your $8 in vain, who have been humiliated and shamelessly deceived by the movies for more than a year now, with little respite and no end in sight. There can be solace in the theater tonight.

"Hearts in Atlantis" comes from one of five stories in King's book by the same name. It paints a rich portrait of childhood in the early 1960s, with a little extra magic a la King.

Bobby Garfield (Anton Yelchin) wants nothing but a shiny new bike for his 11th birthday, but his mother (Hope Davis) claims the poverty defense. Then a refined and mysterious older man named Ted Brautigan (Anthony Hopkins) takes a room in the Garfield's attic. Bobby and Ted begin a long and enriching friendship, during which Bobby reads to Ted for money to buy his bike.

What viewers don't learn until halfway through the film is that Ted's frequent zoning-out episodes are related to his psychic abilities.

The corresponding approach of "low men" - fedora-wearing bad guys who prowl insidiously through Bobby's neighborhood in search of Ted, are also a direct consequence of Ted's ESP.

Eventually we learn, through a brief glimpse at a newspaper article, that the FBI is using psychics to root out communists, but like Bobby, we don't really see the connection to Ted. The film's perspective is genuinely childlike, and for this particular story the result is blissful.

Much like childhood, "Hearts in Atlantis" focuses on the little things, the pretty little details of life. There are shiny chrome fenders and wood floors, and the soft, white world of hanging laundry.

The lighting in this film is like the light in memories; it flows like water into rooms, through glass and leaves and the silken hair of kids playing in a glittering stream. Like Bobby, we are consumed by the surroundings. We forget to care who the low men are, or where Ted comes from. The here and now is glorious.

"Hearts in Atlantis" is obviously just a small fragment of its namesake book, which covers most of Bobby's life. Many of its elements seem like the shadows of bigger ideas, things never truly revealed to us for lack of time or significance.

This is one of the pitfalls of turning literature into film. But the filmmakers knew what King was getting at.

"Hearts in Atlantis" is some kind of reminder, some conscious recollection of those things we have forgotten to believe. Bobby finds strength somewhere in that water-lit memory; Ted is his hero. Even if the audience doesn't know it, maybe he's theirs, too.