The Good Heart

 
Time Investment: 95 min.
Return on Investment: 50 min.
 
There’s some great acting in The Good Heart (Magnolia), an independent feature written and directed by Dagur Kári. Unfortunately, it’s working against a hackneyed script, which it just barely redeems.
 
Brian Cox is excellent as Jacques, a curmudgeonly tavern owner who meets the homeless Lucas (Paul Dano) at the hospital when the former suffers the latest of many heart attacks and the latter has attempted suicide. The older man is grotesquely hostile and dislikable, though funny, and Cox sells him. Dano, meanwhile, is achingly sincere, his innocence and sweetness contrasting sharply with his newfound mentor.
 
Jacques knows his time may be running short, and he wants an heir to his bar—a strange, cozy home for an assemblage of colorful regulars. The timid Lucas works hard to toe the line there—until he takes in a desperate stranger named April (Isild Le Besco, naturalistic and endearing). The presence of a woman, and the ensuing changes Lucas makes in Jacque’s world, create inevitable conflict and threaten to rend the men’s partnership.
 
Even this predictable arc—Lucas opens his friend’s heart and mind, naturally—could have been affecting if it had been played out with less obviousness. Just when I thought I really liked the movie despite its flaws, it did something so cloying and irritating that it all but lost me completely. In the end I just didn’t buy the “redemption” of this wizened old bastard—and what’s more, I didn’t think he deserved one.