Clara's Heart is a 1988 American drama film, based on Joseph Olshan's novel of the same name, directed by Robert Mulligan, written by Mark Medoff and is also Neil Patrick Harris' debut role.
Plot
The Hart family, parents Leona and Bill and son David, suffer the loss of their infant daughter Edith. The parents travel to Jamaica, where they meet a hotel maid, Clara Mayfield, offering her work as the housekeeper. Clara accepts, and takes the position at the family's Baltimore lakefront estate.
Bill and Leona then go their separate ways. Bill dates an interior designer, and Leona moves to California to live with a famed self-help author, Dr. Peter Epstein. David, staying in Baltimore, is upset, perceiving them as focused on themselves instead of their own son.
Filming included several locations in Talbot County, Maryland. The opening scene, a funeral, was filmed at the historic Oxford Cemetery in Oxford, Maryland. The mansion home of Bill (Michael Ontkean) and Leona Hart (Kathleen Quinlan), and her young son, David (Neil Patrick Harris) is found on Old Country Club Road, adjacent to Maryland State Route 33 near Easton, Maryland. Other locations included Saint Michaels, Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland, New York and Port Antonio, Jamaica.
This was the third and final theatrical production made by MTM Enterprises.
Reception
The film received mixed reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, Clara's Heart holds a rating of 47% from 17 reviews. On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 52 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.
Roger Ebert, in a 1 1/2-star review for the Chicago Sun Times, praised Whoopi Goldberg's performance but panned the film itself, writing, "Goldberg is magnificent. The character belongs in a different film, even a different universe, from the rest of the ludicrous plot." Recent praise for the film has appeared in an online article by film professor Robert Keser, who writes, "Almost two decades after the release of Clara’s Heart, the film looks dated only in its virtues. As commercial cinema, it represents a classical control and modulation of storytelling, spinning its emotional threads patiently with no hammering close-ups and little pandering to the decoratively picturesque. Equally, the film seems sweetly unconscious of consumer culture that seeks to define us by acquisition and consumption: no brand names are touted, no recreational shopping montages display products to suggest meaning."