Heartlands

Heartlands
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 8/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 9/10

Heartlands was a movie where the summary covered the basics without doing anything to convey why the movie was wonderful. First things first, it’s not about the American heartlands. There are no prairie states here. It’s set in England.

The premise is that a man’s wife leaves him for his best friend and he travels across the countryside on a motorbike (not like a motorcycle, one of the skinny kind with a lawnmower type engine that requires it not be taken on major highways) to try to get her back.

Along the way he interacts with a huge variety of people, some of whom are nice, some are insulting, some good things happen, some horrid things happen.

What really made this film for me though was the ending. Colin, the main character starts to question his assumptions about his life and comes to realize what he really wants.

I want to talk about the ending, so please don’t click the “more” unless you want to be spoiled.

Colin has chased after his wife Sandra and finally confronted her. She says she’s not going to stay with the loser twit she’d thrown Colin over for…. Colin talks about how he thought they were happy. Earlier in the movie he admits that he’d done everything to make her happy… she wanted to own a store, they got the store. She didn’t want children but wanted fish, so they had just tropical fish. She’d wanted a house, so he bought her a house. He wanted her, so he made sure she had everything she wanted so she would want him. Then she had an affair and rubbed his nose in it, only to discover the new man wasn’t what she wanted once she got him. Colin tells Sandra how much he loves her, how they just got bored, and politely tells her that he’s tired of being mewed up in a tiny corner of the world with the same people all the time. Then he walks away.

I would never have taken that for a happy ending, but it truly was.