Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 3, 1993 TAG: 9307030065
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHANNA STEINMETZ CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Ward's earlier film, "The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey," a time travel adventure, showed him to be a filmmaker with a keen eye for the spectacular image and a perverse sense of storytelling. A lot happens in Ward's movies, much of it hard to follow. They are interesting, nevertheless, because of his fascination with subtext, a fascination that often overshadows narrative logic.
With "Map of the Human Heart," the story of a half-breed Eskimo who leaves the ice floes for World War II London, Ward continues to explore ways in which shifting contexts influence perception and identity.
For no persuasive reason - except, perhaps, to display Lee's range - the aging, alcoholic Eskimo, Avik (Lee), tells his story in flashback. He was found in the 1930s by a British mapmaker (Patrick Bergin) out to survey the territory around his native village. The mapmaker, recognizing that Avik had tuberculosis, flew him to a Montreal sanitarium, where he met a wild, part-Indian orphan named Albertine (Annie Galipeau). Later, in London as a WWII flier making raids on Germany, he encounters Albertine again. They have a tempestuous affair, complicated by her involvement with the mapmaker and her wish to deny her non-Anglo heritage.
The film's dramatic flow is choppy, sometimes to the point of causing utter bewilderment. But Ward layers his scenes with images that speak volumes about the story he is trying so awkwardly to tell. He combines an almost anthropological zeal with poetic license to portray the collision of Eskimo and Anglo culture, one minute showing us Avik's toothless grandmother savoring raw seal, the next carrying the Eskimo boy on a magical flight in a biplane over an elk herd and whale pod, finally descending through cloud cover to the lights of Montreal. That Ward's special effects are not especially sophisticated only adds to the film's mythic flavor.
Ward is equally good at distilling his characters' emotions in pictures. He captures Avik's terror in the sanitarium with a number of stunning shots - a bird flying past a window viewed upside down, the stark outlines of an X-ray, an interplay of mirrors. Later, in what has to count as the cinematographic equivalent of the simultaneous orgasm, Avik and Albertine make love atop a helium balloon tethered to the green English countryside, while we watch from the air.
Beautifully filmed as they are, these visual metaphors too often are asked to do the work of narrative in a script that seems spotty at best. Scene after scene is sabotaged by overheated dialog, the worst of which is a line Bergin should have been paid overtime to speak: "Women are like a map. You have to understand their latitudes and how much longitude you can take."
In the opening moments of "Map of the Human Heart," the screen is filled with a close-up of Arctic ice looking like the Milky Way, while portentous organ music fills the soundtrack. It's a nice piece of trompe l'oeil, but it suggests that Ward's ambitions for this project far outstripped the intentions and capacities of its screenplay.
\ Map of the Human Heart: A Miramax Films release showing at the Grandin Theatre. Rated R for some strong language, sexual situations. 107 minutes.
by CNB