Final Rating: 2/5
An army veteran and a decommissioned service dog brave the Alaskan wilderness in David Ayer’s Heart of the Beast.
Heart stars Brad Pitt as James Belmont, a veteran and amateur pilot with PTSD from his time in the Middle East. Along with Odin, a K-9 unit from his time abroad, Belmont flies out to the middle of nowhere to get away from civilization for a while. While trying to leave, Belmont suffers a heart attack, crash-landing his plane into a lake and stranding Odin and himself in the forest. Now missing most of their gear, Belmont and Odin must make their way back to civilization.
For most of the film, Pitt and co-star Uber the dog are the only actors on screen. The emotional heavy lifting comes from Pitt: Belmont talks to Odin occasionally to command or reassure him, but the dog is not the most talkative partner. Belmont spends the movie caught between melancholy and nostalgia. He’s haunted by non-specific visions of the war he fought in and otherwise focused on surviving each day.
Jared Michael Fry’s score helpfully swells and drones to establish an even sadder tone. Meanwhile, cinematographer Mauro Fiore captures sweeping shots of the mountainous Alaskan wilderness, making our protagonists feel minuscule by comparison.
Each of these elements together leaves Heart feeling rather ethereal. Ayer paints a picture of a forest that seems endless, with characters that feel timeless. Belmont seems to be an Iraq war vet, but his flashbacks are vague enough they could be referring to almost any US deployment of the last 40 years.
The only other character our leads encounter is a retired gold miner played by J. K. Simmons, wearing clothes that could be from the mid-20th century as easily as they could be from the mid-21st. He appears over a hill, spends a few hours with Belmont, and then disappears in the night, “like [he] was never there.” On his exit, the miner dons his gear to affect a tall, cloak-like silhouette while rowing a canoe slowly out of frame, evoking the image of Charon on the River Styx before leaving Belmont and his dog to fend for themselves in an abandoned wilderness.
Heart is at its strongest when it feels like a ghost story; a journey through a kind of underworld in which Belmont is repeatedly confronted by his past. But the lack of specificity in Belmont’s story leaves Heart cold. Pitt puts in a physically demanding and impressive performance, but it never fully resonates, because his character doesn’t feel fully fleshed out. The bond between Belmont and Odin is functional, but feels too in the moment, like they’re coworkers, rather than sharing a history.
Ayer frequently stops the action to show off Belmont’s survivalist skills. At different points, he nearly drowns, sustains a compound fracture, makes himself an improvised sling, and starts multiple fires using his ever-dwindling supplies. Seeing Pitt sustain and recover from increasingly gnarly injuries feeds further into the idea that this is a man on his final journey. The realism does work slightly against the film’s more abstract qualities, however.
Ultimately, Heart is two movies: one a gritty survivalist drama, the other about two hardened soldiers on their final mission. Ayer’s direction scene-to-scene indicates that either one could be compelling enough to carry a full movie, but Heart doesn’t commit, ending up more as two halves.
