Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) is a frustrated man. He wants to be a good husband and father to his three children but has no marketable skills and can’t find more than occasional work as a day laborer. His wife Andais (Kaycee Moore), who works all day then comes home to cook dinner and take care of the kids, is fed up with him and with the life of grinding poverty to which the family seems condemned. The kids, meanwhile, are mainly concerned with staying out of the line of fire, while the oldest daughter takes the lion’s share of responsibility for caring for the two younger ones.
Such is life for one family in Watts in the 1980s, as captured in Billy Woodberry’s 1983 neorealist film Bless Their Little Hearts. The Banks household may not realize it, but they’re living exemplars of what it feels to be on the losing end of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, which shifted America away from the expectation that wealth should be shared to allowing the wealthy few to hoard it, courtesy of vastly reduced tax rates for those in the upper income brackets and cuts in social programs for those near the bottom.
Charlie is clearly the central character in Bless Their Little Hearts, and we’re meant to sympathize with him even when he’s acting badly: shaming his son by asking him if he’s a little girl (the boy’s crime: failing to keep his fingernails trimmed), spending time and money on a woman not his wife, and then expecting his wife to accept his lies when the perfume on his shirt is a dead giveaway. But he’s also a man with good intentions who thinks there’s something more out there for him, even if it keeps eluding his grasp. Andais gets much less screen time but holds her own, mainly through the strength Moore brings to her portrayal, while the other cast members create a sense of the community in which the Banks family dwells.
There are no monumental events in Bless Their Little Hearts, which is more a study of daily life among ordinary, well-meaning people who don’t understand why their lives are so relentlessly difficult. It firmly situates the Banks household in a specific time and place and foregoes filmmaking tricks in favor of a straightforward approach that makes it feel almost like a documentary. It’s worth noting that this film is part of the LA Rebellion, a movement in filmmaking which began in the late 1960s at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television when students of color began making films that told stories reflecting the lives and concerns of their communities.
Charles Burnett (director of Killer of Sheep and To Sleep with Anger, among other films) acted as both cinematographer and screenwriter for Bless Their Little Hearts, although the screenplay is more of a scenario that left much of the dialogue to be improvised. Most of the actors are non-professionals, and even the leads have only a few screen credits, which helps lend a feeling of authenticity to the film. Despite their lack of experience, Hardman and Moore are convincing throughout and sometimes rise to brilliance, most obviously in a pivotal domestic fight scene that highlights the shifting emotions of two people worn out by a life of endless struggle.
An effective, jazzy soundtrack carries the emotional meaning in many dialogue-less scenes, an approach that, like voiceover, simplifies the filmmaking process while also drawing attention to the created nature of film. Richard Cervantes is credited for the sound in Bless Their Little Hearts, but I have no idea if he wrote or arranged the music heard on the soundtrack or if it uses pre-existing recordings. Woodberry uses the same technique to good effect in the short “The Pocketbook” which is included on this disc.
Bless Their Little Hearts was originally shot on 16mm black and white and is presented on this disk in a restored version by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, with picture restoration by The Stanford Theater Film Laboratory and Fotokem and sound restoration by Audio Mechanics. It won two awards at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival and was named to the National Film Registry in 2013. | Sarah Boslaugh
Bless Their Little Hearts is distributed on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber and on streaming by Milestone Films. Extras on the disc include an audio commentary by film scholar Ed Guererro; a 2011 video interview with Billy Woodberry about how the film was made; a gallery of annotated behind-the-scenes photos; a 2018 interview with NYU professor Ed Guererro; Billy Woodberry’s first film, the short “The Pocketbook”; footage from a workshop with Billy Woodberry; The Blu-ray also includes an illustrated booklet with essays by filmmaker Allison Anders and Cornell professor Samantha N. Sheppard.
