I always had a feeling that Oprah Winfrey was better at choosing restaurants than she was at picking books.  And here’s the proof – Oprah singled out Billie Letts’ novel “Where the Heart Is” for her Book Club selection on December 7, 1998 (a day that will live in infamy).  Being chosen by Oprah is a wonderful thing for everyone involved.  The publisher sees sales and profits expand like … well, like Oprah’s waistline.  The author is able to have their work enjoyed by that coveted demographic of housewives, night-shift workers, welfare moms and people that manufacture fake disabilities to get out of work.  And these readers get to take a break from studying Soap Opera Digest and enjoy something different once Oprah commands them to march to bookstores like an army of the undead and spend their grocery money on a novel they hadn’t even heard of until that day.

The problem is when they try to make this crap into films.  Where the Heart Is is one of the most uneven pictures I’ve seen this year.  The only thing that made it remotely interesting is Natalie Portman.  This is touted as her big, coming-of-age, breakout role, and the film’s one-sheet hammers that point home by showing the alluring actress in a half-turn which prominently displays both her nimble hindquarters and perky chest.  Portman is a purty l’il firecracker, but the luminous actress can’t keep Heart from festering like a fart trapped in a crowded elevator.

Portman (Anywhere But Here) plays Novalee Nation (seriously), a seventeen-year-old from Tennessee that, as the film opens, is traveling across the country with her boyfriend Willy Jack Pickens (Dylan Bruno, The Rage: Carrie 2).  They stop at a Sequoyah, Oklahoma Wal-Mart, where Willy Jack decides to take off and leave Novalee inside, literally barefoot and pregnant.  She opts to live in the Wal-Mart (there’s worse places to be trapped – like the entire Bible Belt) and does so for six weeks, neatly putting back the stuff that she uses and keeping a running tab of what she owes the store.  Then Novalee squirts out her kid (named Americus…seriously) and becomes an instant celebrity.

You would think this would be the set-up for the rest of the film, showing how Novalee has to deal with becoming famous for essentially being the epitome of Tennessee trailer-trash, only to become adjusted to her newfound stardom just as the fifteen-minute fame-bell strikes.  But not so.  Heart is more about the relationships that Novalee makes as a result of giving birth to “the Wal-Mart baby.”  And I need a movie about relationships like I need a sequel to The Flintstones.

Novalee befriends her hospital nurse named Lexie Coop (Ashley Judd, Eye of the Beholder), a single mom that has a litter of kids named after various kinds of junk food.  She maintains a monogamous relationship with Forney (James Frain, Reindeer Games), the town librarian that helped deliver Americus.  She learns a trade from Wal-Mart photographer named Moses Whitecotton (Keith David, Pitch Black).  And Novalee is taken in by Sister Thelma Husband (Stockard Channing, Isn’t She Great) after she’s ditched again by her mother (Sally Field, who has only made one mainstream film since telling Forrest Gump that life is indeed like a box of chocolates).  In the book, there’s a young American Indian boy named Benny Goodluck, but his character didn’t make it into the film for some reason.  And here’s something else bizarre – in the book, Novalee was superstitious about the number seven, but the film changed it to number five.  Go figure.

While some people may find the content of the film more interesting than I did, you can’t overlook the fact that it’s slopped together with the care and patience of an epilectic crack-addict on a trampoline.  While predominately a drama, Heart has moments where it slips into action-flick territory and later turns into a mystery-thriller.  I guess this way there’s something for everybody, but it also means that the picture runs about thirty minutes too long.  And don’t even get me started on the whole thread of Willy Jack’s adventures in the music industry, even though this subplot does introduce a hysterical Joan Cusack (High Fidelity) who plays his agent.

Okay, so you’ve got your rope ready, but who do you lynch?  Start with screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, probably best known for writing Billy Crystal’s dud trilogy of City Slickers II, Forget Paris and Father’s Day.  Then move on to director Matt Williams.  No, not the Arizona Diamondbacks slugger, though you can hardly tell the difference.  This Matt Williams is the co-creator of Roseanne and Home Improvement, and Heart is his directorial debut.

The acting is pretty solid all around, especially from Portman and Frain, the later of whom wears a ski cap at the beginning of the film and is a dead ringer for Tobey Maguire when his thick afro is hidden. Heart is one of those films where you know that their characters were meant to be together even before they do.  But I think they’ve got laws about dating guys with afros in Oklahoma, so the whole romance thing drags out for two hours over five cinematic years.  Unlike Anywhere But Here, Portman is in almost every scene, and she’s so flat-out mesmerizing that it almost doesn’t matter that the film sucks.

I said almost.

2:00  - for adult language