Where the Heart Is Reviews
Top CriticWilliams and the Ganz/Mandel team never establish a consistent tone, shuttling from funny scenes to serious ones so arbitrarily that the two moods cancel each other out.
Serves up the usual homilies, but it lacks the quirky density and cinematic snap of, for instance, Jonathan Demme in his Melvin and Howard period.
Internet Reviews
The film has some memorable moments but overall comes across surprisingly flat.
Full Review
| Original Score: 7/10
Banal and trite where it could have been insightful and emotionally truthful.
Reel.com
Though Natalie Portman buoys the film with her heartfelt turn as the naïve heroine Novalee Nation, this cloying portrait of personal transformation has all the impact of a TV movie -- dotted with Wal-Mart commercials.
| Original Score: 2/4
SPLICEDWire
This low-impact unwed motherhood epic never gets any deeper than a pebble skipping across a pond.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
eye WEEKLY
So sugary sweet and packed with magic-realistic miracles it plays like an Oprah Winfrey-produced miniseries on crack.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
San Francisco Examiner
The movie becomes the synthetic, airless heart-warmer you feared was on its way.
Where the Heart Is fails to build much emotional momentum.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Film Journal International
Aspires to be funny, poignant and inspirational, but real emotion seldom penetrates its sticky sugar coating.
It evokes laughs and a few tears, but also groans at bad material.
Watching Where the Heart Is, in fact, is a little like listening to the town gossip run her mouth about everyone she knows.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Where the Heart Is displays an unerring ability to go where the schmaltz is.
It appears to have been cobbled together from all the story lines the network sponsors wouldn't approve.
Where the Heart Is is everything that cynical moviegoers despise.
The moronic script by Lowell Ganz and 'Babaloo' Mandel has all the subtlety of a Hee Haw reunion and more schmaltz than a Catskills retirement home.
The director, Matt Williams, does little to keep the audience from jumping ahead of the script.
It's too bad [Portman and Frain's] contributions, and those of many others, drown in a big glop of treacle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 0.5/5
Greenwich Village Gazette
This is a superficial film, a condensation of an entire season of a TV sitcom.
