Hearts in Atlantis (film)

Hearts in Atlantis is a 2001 American mystery drama film directed by Scott Hicks and starring Anthony Hopkins and Anton Yelchin. It is loosely adapted from Stephen King's Dark Tower tie-in "Low Men in Yellow Coats," a novella in the 1999 collection Hearts in Atlantis after which the film was named.

The film is dedicated to the memory of its cinematographer, Piotr Sobociński, who died of a heart attack a few months before its release.

Plot
Middle-aged photographer and businessman Robert "Bobby" Garfield returns to his old hometown upon learning that his best friend, decorated soldier John "Sully" Sullivan, has died in a traffic accident and begins recollecting his past when he visits his childhood home which has long since been abandoned. During a summer in the 1960s, an eleven-year-old Bobby lives with his widowed mother, self-centered Liz Garfield, and has two friends, Carol Gerber and Sully. They experienced many things together, the most mysterious of which was meeting an older gentleman named Ted Brautigan, whom Liz takes in as a boarder.

Ted takes the lonely Bobby under his wing, while his mother is busy with her job. The two form a father-son bond, and it slowly becomes evident that Ted has some psychic and telekinetic powers, which are the reason he has come to this sleepy town. In due course Ted explains that he has escaped the grasp of the "Low Men", strange people who would stop at nothing to get him back in their control.

After reading Bobby's mind and realizing that the boy dreams of owning a bicycle, Ted kindly offers Bobby $1 a week in exchange for his reading a newspaper out loud. Bobby quickly figures out that Ted has some other purpose in mind. Mysteriously, Ted asks Bobby to keep an eye on the neighborhood looking for any signs of the "low men", like announcements about missing pets. Bobby sees one, but does not tell Ted, afraid to lose his new friend.

Bobby, Carol and John have frequent conflicts with the local town bully, Harry Doolin, whom Ted scares away by looking into his mind and finding out that his violence is used to cover up his secret cross-dressing. However, at one point, Harry harasses and injures Carol, and when Ted manipulates her dislocated shoulder into place, Liz arrives, after being raped by her boss, and mistakenly believes that Ted is a child molester. She is confronted by Ted's ability to tell her the truth about what she has been through, and how her behavior is affecting her relationship with her son, providing another reason that Ted must leave. Ted is eventually captured with the help of a tip from Liz. As some form of closure, Ted yells to Bobby as he is being driven away that he would not have missed a moment "not for all the world", and later Bobby mirrors the same feelings. Bobby is later confronted by Harry, but Bobby grabs the latter's baseball bat and beats him with it. Liz finds a new job in Boston and moves the family there. Before he leaves, Bobby and Carol say their goodbyes and share a final kiss.

Returning to the present, Bobby turns to leave his old home wherein he meets a young girl named Molly. The two strike up a conversation wherein Molly reveals that she is Carol's daughter and that Carol died in recent years. Bobby gives Molly a photograph of a young Carol and the two become friends.

Cast

 * Anthony Hopkins as Ted Brautigan
 * Anton Yelchin as Robert "Bobby" Garfield
 * David Morse as Adult Robert "Bobby" Garfield
 * Hope Davis as Elizabeth "Liz" Garfield
 * Mika Boorem as Carol Gerber
 * Boorem also plays Molly, Carol's daughter, whom the adult Bobby meets in the present.
 * Deirdre O'Connell as Mrs. Gerber
 * Will Rothhaar as John "Sully" Sullivan
 * Timmy Reifsnyder as Harry Doolin
 * Alan Tudyk as Monte Man
 * Tom Bower as Len Files
 * Celia Weston as Alana Files
 * Adam LeFevre as Don Biderman

Production
Director Scott Hicks stated that, after reviewing casting tapes, Anton Yelchin was his top choice to play Bobby Garfield. Hicks then brought Yelchin to Charleston, where Anthony Hopkins was filming Hannibal, to read with Hopkins. Hopkins was impressed with Yelchin and was in agreement with Hicks about casting him in the film. Hearts in Atlantis was Yelchin's feature film debut.

The film was shot in Richmond and Staunton, Virginia.

Box office
Hearts in Atlantis opened at #3 raking in $9,021,494 in its opening weekend at the U.S. box office. The film would eventually gross a domestic total of $24,185,781, somewhat short of its $31 million budget, but with an international $6,733,634, it would total $30,919,415.

Reception
Hearts in Atlantis received mixed reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has an approval rating of 49% based on reviews from 137 critics, with an average score of 5.8/10 and the consensus states "Hearts in Atlantis is well-acted and beautiful to look at, but the movie is nothing more than a mood piece." According to Metacritic, which sampled the opinions of 30 critics and calculated a score of 55 out of 100, the film received "mixed or average reviews".

Roger Ebert gave it three and a half out of four stars.