Remember that game in school where the teacher would write the first sentence of a story and then pass it around the class? Everybody would write a sentence, but the paper was folded so you could only read the last sentence before yours. Where the Heart Is has a screenplay like that, zigging and zagging and wildly careening from one melodramatic development to the next. What halfway holds it together are the performances, which are convincing and deserve a story with a touch more sanity.
The movie is based on a popular novel by Billie Letts, about a 17-year-old unwed mother named Novalee Nation (Natalie Portman), who is abandoned by her no-good boyfriend in a Wal-Mart in Sequoia, Okla., and lives secretly in the store until she gives birth to her child, little Americus. The baby is delivered by the town s substitute librarian, Forney (James Frain), who has been following her, moonstruck, and breaks through the store s plate-glass window as she goes into labor. She finds a home loc