Growing up, I always gravitated towards the characters who didn’t quite know how to say what they meant. The ones who stood slightly outside every conversation, watching the room with a disconcerting intensity. When I spotted characters like that, I got glimpses of how I might render from the outside. I recognized them immediately, I just knew they were my people.
Adam is one of those characters.
And Christian Slater was really good at playing those. Here, he’s a dishwasher at a Minneapolis diner, he’s a guy who barely speaks, listens to his records alone in his apartment, and follows Caroline (Marisa Tomei) home every night from a distance to make sure she gets there safely. He was raised by nuns in an orphanage who told him he had the heart of a baboon, and Adam believed it. He held onto that story the way some of us hold onto anything that explains why we might feel things differently than everyone around us.
Incidentally, the movie was inspired by Baby Fae, the infant who received a cross-species heart transplant in 1984 and became one of the most infamous news stories of the year.
But if you look at Adam through a modern lens and feel uneasy, that’s fair, because caution is always reasonable. But caution protects you, it’s not the same thing as judgement and it definitely doesn’t warrant cruelty. Because you can also see a guy who has no social skills, no frame of reference for how you’re supposed to express what you feel, doing the only thing that makes sense to him with the tools he has. It’s not like he can easily say he cares, so he walks behind her in the snow and makes sure she’s okay. It’s imperfect, it’s awkward, it’s messy and it’s not necessarily meant to be aspirational. And yet, if we’re honest, it’s completely relatable. Some of us had been that person, standing on the outside of a feeling with no idea how to get in.
Tomei had just won her Oscar for My Cousin Vinny, and what she does here is almost the opposite of that performance. She strips away all the Brooklyn fireworks (but the accent, not so much) and plays Caroline as a Minneapolis waitress who keeps picking the wrong guys because she’s looking in all the wrong directions, while the right one is three feet away scrubbing dishes, saying nothing and being completely unreadable. She feels rooted in a real place, a real diner, a real sense of being shiftless and stuck in your mid 20s without a way forward.
Rosie Perez as her best friend Cindy is the other great reason to watch this, nobody says the word “underwear” like Rosie.
Critics called it syrupy. Roger Ebert gave it three stars and said its heart was in the right place, which is very apropos.
But while critics were reviewing the movie, we 20-something audiences were responding to what Slater and Tomei carried between them in the pauses and the small gestures and the way they looked at each other when neither one had a line to say. Thirty years later, people are still watching this movie, still crying at the ending, still telling their kids it’s a great love story, and then maybe reconsidering the following-her-home part. Still, Damaged awkward people trying to make sense of things is my kind of love story.
There were characters like Adam scattered across the movies we grew up with, people who moved through the world with a gentleness and an oddness that nobody needed to explain. They were beautiful and strange and pure, and we loved them without needing to make that difference something to fix.
Untamed Heart is a simple movie about two people finding each other in a diner in Minneapolis, navigating the distance between what they feel and what they’re able to say out loud. Sometimes two people make sense together in a way that defies every reasonable objection, and the time they have, however brief, is worth every second of it.
And just to spoil things…
If you’re one of those people who can’t handle the ending, I get it.
You can always stop the movie right when Adam catches the puck at the North Stars game. That’s a perfectly good place to leave those two, happy and whole, holding onto something they caught out of thin air.
Nobody would blame you.
-Pop
Untamed Heart arrived on Home Video this week in 1993, after a February 12th theatrical release.