"Heart of Midnight is a character study into madness, about someone who doesn't like herself and doesn't know why. And through the course of the film she finds out and decides it's easier to be mad than to exist with this knowledge." – Jennifer Jason Leigh, Premiere magazine, 1989
Carol Rivers (Leigh) is a fragile young woman who lives with her trashy mom (Brenda Vaccaro). She hates to be touched, has a leg in a plaster cast, and a history of nervous breakdowns. When her long-estranged uncle Fletcher dies of AIDS, she inherits his dilapidated nightclub and, upon moving in and attempting to renovate, soon discovers its seedy past life as a massage parlour with a clientele of swinging S & M sickos. It isn't long before Carol is struggling to stave off another breakdown: taps drip blood, corridors pant and moan, an apple oozes maggots, a severed rat's head is found in the water system, giant eyeballs float inside her waterbed, and she suffers a harrowing rape at the hands of lowlife workmen. Amidst all this, Peter Coyote shows up as an impostor cop with uncertain designs on her.
Heart of Midnight wears its influences on its sleeve: Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Dario Argento's Suspiria, and Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death. It suffers from obvious plot loopholes and clumsy dialogue, as well as all the limitations of its B-movie budget: poor sound compression, shoddy location shooting, even a boom mic that dips in and out of the frame. But it remains an important early film in Leigh's career, and thus one worth revisiting. She is sympathetic and believable throughout, managing to make Carol a heroine of unusual strength, vulnerability and above all intelligence. And, while most critics didn't care for the film itself, they had by now started paying Leigh serious attention.
"The classic Leigh film," noted Philip Weiss in Rolling Stone, "possesses all the trappings of a B movie, stays in the theaters for only a few weeks, and is memorable mostly for a mesmerizing performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh." All Movie Guide critic Brian J. Dillard wrote, "Leigh, as vulnerable and naturalistic as she's ever been, delivers the kind of lead performance that can just about banish the notion that there's not much really going on in the script itself." According to Hal Hinson of the Washington Post, "Leigh is a marvel. She has some of that feeling of damaged goods that Tuesday Weld used to have, but there's something wholly singular about her neurasthenia – an innocence – that makes Carol seem even more fragile, even more in danger. Whenever the movie leaves you wandering without a map, her performance works as a compass to get us back on track." Perhaps the sweetest praise came from Danny Peary, one of Leigh's earliest supporters, who praised it as "a jolting performance from one of this era's most fascinating, offbeat and daring young actresses", and even went so far as to award her his 1989 Best Actress Oscar in his book Alternate Oscars (billed as "One Critic's Defiant Choices for Best Picture, Actor and Actress – from 1927 to the Present"). Peary elaborated: "Leigh doesn't play her character as an intense woman – Carol's not as mad as she suspects – but she plays her as someone who's definitely strange. And not only because she carries on conversations with herself (especially in the mirror) and imagined guests, or that she races her bike through the narrow halls, or that she sings along to Ethel Waters, a most unusual musical choice.
Leigh's eyes and head movements are always slightly askew; even her way of walking is different, because for some reason she wears a cast over one foot. She keeps withdrawing, partly from fear of physical harm, partly from fear of mental anguish ("Don't try to psychoanalyze me," she angrily tells Sharpe/Larry). Yet she keeps forcing herself to return and face her problems head-on: staying by herself the night she is attacked; walking determinedly back into the dangerous club when she knows there is someone else inside; and shuffling along the halls with legs spread, pointing her pistol downward, hitting it aggressively against the floor. "Do you hear that, you little shit? It's the sound of my gun pointed at your head." She's not so timid."Reportedly, Leigh was disappointed with how Heart of Midnight turned out. She had done her customary extensive research for the project: meeting with women who had been abused as children, interviewing psychologists, attending crisis clinics, writing diaries and back-histories in Carol's voice, and likely felt disheartened when she saw the final product – something akin to a psychosexual haunted-house horror. But her hard work had paid off in a typically rich and vivid performance, one that's well worth revisiting today.
