Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/462877
24 CINEMONTAGE / WINTER 2015 communicate hope for a better tomorrow. Shots captured by the second unit — of bluebells in bloom, a telephone pole-lined road, a lonely windmill — were intercut by Littleton. "Benton had primarily seen the credit sequence as vignettes, a visual introduction of the characters," she says, "and I thought it needed to be interspersed with the town itself, giving it more scope from the beginning." Throughout the rest of the film, she cuts to wide angles of two of Waxahachie's most important institutions: the courthouse and the church. "The dominant image, the one that we go back to all the time, is the county courthouse," she explains. "It almost looks like a cathedral. It's the symbol of justice, of authority and of order in the world. And then we cut back to the church — the religious, ethical order in their lives." One of the trickiest scenes to edit also highlights the film's basic theme — as Atticus Finch put it in another great work with a Depression-era setting, To Kill a Mockingbird: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view." After Will has moved into Edna's house, he heedlessly enters the kitchen to complain about her children — not realizing that Edna is taking a bath. "She has kind of questioned all along whether he's really blind, and he intrudes on her bath and then she realizes that he is in fact blind," Littleton says. For Will, the moment is also one of discovery; he confirms, by his hand accidentally splashing the top of the water in the tub, that in his ranting and raving, he has invaded Edna's privacy. "It was a scene that took a certain amount of skill to have both people in a parallel track of realizing a truth about each other," Littleton says. "That's the moment when Malkovich, as Mr. Will, starts to evolve." Many other scenes play in master shots. "We had conventional coverage," Littleton says. "But I just felt, if it was unfolding in a take and it was holding, why cut away?" The most obvious example of not cutting away comes in the film's celebrated ending. Communion is being given at the church, and the camera gently moves with the plate of tiny cups of wine as it passes from one churchgoer in the pew to the next, until we realize that all of the film's characters are in attendance, including those no longer in town (such as Moze, who had to move following threats from the Ku Klux Klan) and those no longer among the living (such as Edna's late husband and the young man who took his life, who sit together as if they were at peace with each other). "I think what surprised me most when I saw the last shot was the emotional power of an image to evoke the brotherhood of man," Littleton says. But the shot almost didn't happen. The editor was called to the location when the crew was rehearsing the shot at Bethany Baptist Church. Benton said he was having trouble with the staging and felt he needed a new ending. Littleton asked him, "What are you talking about? You're getting cold feet today?" There were problems with the camera rig snaking through the pews, which had to be removed a row at a time as the shot was unfolding, and concern that the take would be too noisy. But Littleton — along with producers Arlene Donovan and Michael Hausman, as well as Almendros — urged Benton to go through with the shot. Littleton told him, "Benton, this is the reason you're making the movie." Following several rehearsals and six takes, they got the shot. "It is the signature, transcendent ending of the film," she says. The success of Places in the Heart surprised Littleton. "Everybody thought, 'Well, this is just a little movie,'" she says. She watched the film again recently, for the first time in about 25 years, as she was completing her current project in New York. The film that spoke to Mildred, for what it said about the past, continues to speak to her daughter, for what it says about the present. "As I came out from work, all these demonstrators — spurred by police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island — were walking down Canal Street, blocking traffic," she says. "Didn't we have a civil rights movement? Are we still struggling with this? God, it's horrible. The notion that we could state the problems of race and poverty in Places in the Heart without one ounce of cynicism is remarkable. There's a basic humanity that Americans share, and that is so rarely pictured on the screen." f MY MOST MEMORABLE FILM Places in the Heart, MCA/ Universal Pictures/ Photofest.