Lonely Hearts
April 13 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 15
The premise that began this year’s streak of essays was that film in 2025 has ossified into two zones: IP driven megafranchises and microbudget indies. The vast realm of midbudget fare has broadly vanished from the landscape, and this category of film has historically been where Hollywood has managed to produce its masterpieces. The showcase musicals of the 1960s regularly ran in the $20 million to $30 million range, and with a few exceptions are broadly forgotten. Midnight Cowboy (1969) cost $3.5 million and is considered a classic of New Hollywood. While it’s fondly remembered today, it’s tough to compare the legacy of Superman (1978, $55 million budget) to the legacy of the much more modestly budgeted Star Wars (1977, $11 million budget). Everyone in the Anglophone world knows It’s A Wonderful Life (1946, $3.1 million budget), few but the most devoted cinephiles know Duel In The Sun (1946, $6.5 million budget). Big budgets do not necessarily make for enduring art. Today, while filmmakers have found ways to do more with less, you can see the way that corners are cut and there’s not as much spectacle to be seen with modern middlebrow adult cinema. Brady Corbet got a lot for his money out of The Brutalist (2024) but while it’s impressive just how much he was able to get for his $10 million, the film may forever be remembered as a film about a man making a building that is never actually depicted onscreen. The problem is that the middlebrow midbudget adult cinema experience is itself a risk, not just for filmmakers but for moviegoers as well. What happens if you get what you ask for, a good looking movie with movie stars that isn’t IP schlock and it still sucks? Like Lonely Hearts?
Lonely Hearts is a fictionalized telling of the story of Raymond Fernandez & Martha Beck, known as the Lonely Hearts Killers, a pair of serial murderers who operated in the United States just after World War II. The story is told as a split narrative between homicide detectives Elmer Robinson (John Travolta) and Charles Hildebrandt (James Gandolfini) as they uncover the criminal activity of the Lonely Hearts Killers, and Fernandez (Jared Leto) and Beck (Salma Hayek) themselves as they commit their crimes. Detective Robinson is haunted by the suicide of his wife and feels estranged from his son and thus throws himself at his work to ease the pain. In the meantime, Raymond Fernandez is operating as a small time con man, stealing cash from war widows and old maids who buy his sweet talk via correspondence when he meets Martha Beck, who becomes his partner in crime, posing as Fernandez’s sister as they find wealthy women to dupe and then kill for their meager fortunes. While eventually Robinson and Hildebrandt find the killers and bring them to justice, they do so at the expense of their own faith in humanity for having experienced such brutality.
Everything about Lonely Hearts is something that should work on paper but the film as a whole never really gels. Travolta, Gandolfini, and Hayek are all incredibly talented performers, and in the correct situation I don’t mind Leto too much. While none of them feel like they’re phoning in their performances none of them feel compelling either. Each character has their “thing” and none of them really stray from that thing enough to make the character feel real. Travolta is sad, Leto is mercurial, and Hayek is jealous. Jared Leto definitely does the Jared Leto thing where he does some over the top performance detail work designed to make nerds like me think he’s Daniel Day Lewis and it doesn’t work. In this instance Leto —a man with a gorgeous head of hair— wears a hairpiece that mimics the real Ray Fernandez’s receding hairline, and then wears a cheap looking toupee on top of that. The closest thing to a noteworthy performance is Gandolfini, who believably plays a likeable well adjusted guy whose job unfortunately requires him to confront some of the darker elements of humanity, but unfortunately his character is the smallest part among the four primary actors.
The source material of the very real Lonely Hearts Killers also has everything one needs to make a compelling film out of it. The very real 20th century sensationalist crimes of people like Leopold & Loeb and Richard Hickock & Perry Smith were rendered into highly compelling films like Compulsion (1959) and In Cold Blood (1967). The Lonely Hearts Killers themselves had already inspired a beloved cult film: 1970’s The Honeymoon Killers. Lonely Hearts though just doesn’t have the juice. It is neither thrilling or titillating enough to merit its violent content, nor is any character written well enough to warrant being either sympathetic or fascinating.
If anything, the biggest problem with the film is how glossy it feels. Detective Elmer Robinson doesn’t feel like a tragic hero throwing himself into work to escape his grief. The tidiness of his dead wife and strained relationship with his child feel more like tips and tricks from a screenwriting book than as real character details. In defiance of the historical details of the murders, Beck & Fernandez’s last victim —an 11 year old girl— isn’t murdered in cold blood, but is accidentally killed after they try and fail to adopt her as their own child. The whole thing reads as an attempt to depict the pair as a kind of twisted loving couple rather than a pair of cold blooded psychopaths. In addition, Leto and Hayak are two of the most conventionally gorgeous people who have ever lived, and this works against the real story of the real killers, who were honestly kinda average looking. Everyone would love being kissed by someone who looks like Jared Leto, so it renders his skill as a con man and lothario kinda moot. What’s a substantially more interesting story is how a dumpy middle aged bald man managed to swindle dozens of women out of their money.
So one mid budget crime thriller with an adult audience is kind of a dud. This in itself isn’t noteworthy. Duds happen. What is noteworthy is that every movie but one1 released the weekend of April 13, 2007 was an original concept, many with real budgets, and I had heard of none of them. If I weren’t purposefully watching as many films as possible from one year I likely never would have even considered watching them. You hope going into a project like this to find diamonds in the rough, but sometimes you just find rough. It’s not that I approve of the disappearance of the midbudget original concept film, but going through this slate, I kinda understand.
We look through the past with rose colored glasses. We remember those moments when art was noteworthy, when it was revolutionary, when it changed things or was just a perfect distillation of a certain kind of aesthetics. We rarely remember the schlock. When people think about the 60s in music they think about The Beatles and Sam Cooke and Jimi Hendrix. No one thinks about Herb Alpert or Herman’s Hermits or Henry Mancini, and they certainly forget that Hendrix only had one top 40 hit while Mancini had seven. When we think of a time period and the art it produced, we need to remember that for every Zodiac there are probably five Lonely Hearts.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ Too slick, too polished, and too Jared-Leto-containing to be enjoyable. Too much attention paid to craft to be truly awful.
Economics: April 13 2007 saw the release of eight new films in American movie theaters. Three were in the top 10 (Disturbia —a kind of Rear Window for teens— at #1, Halle Berry journalism thriller Perfect Stranger at #3, and Viking-child-raised-by-11th-century-Mi'kmaq-band historial action film Pathfinder at #6). Everything in the top 10 was an original concept with the exception of 300 at #92, and every one of them is okay at best with the exception of genuine treasure / commercial disappointment Grindhouse at #10.
Lonely Hearts was clearly buried by its studio, as it debuted on 23 screens at #43 at the box office, just behind Christmas 2006 holdover Dreamgirls in its 18th week of release3. It would ultimately make $188 thousand against its $18 million budget. Adjusted for inflation $18 million has $27 million in buying power today. For context: this gives it a de facto bigger budget than all but three of the ten best picture nominees of 2025: A Complete Unknown, Wicket Part One and ⊃⋃⋂⪽ 2 had bigger budgets. Nickel Boys had a budget of $23 million, Emilia Pérez had a budget of €21 million, Conclave had a budget of $20 million, The Substance had a budget of $17.5 million, The Brutalist had a budget of $10 million, I’m Still Here had a budget of R$8.8 million, and best picture winner Anora had a budget of $6 million.
Next Week: Hot Fuzz
the exception is Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters
Even that wasn’t based on any kind of mega-hit IP, it’s just that in the wake of Sin City (2005) everything Frank Miller flavored had a halo effect.
Another thing that seems like it comes from another universe in researching this project is the longevity of films in theatrical release. In 2007 a movie that’s been out for 18 weeks could still be in theaters. A Complete Unknown is 18 weeks past theatrical debut today. It’s on Hulu.