Heartland review – Jessica Chastain’s Netflix country music thriller is more miss than hit

The Oscar winner plays a singer turned detective searching for her niece in an overly generic Nashville-based mystery that fails to find its footing Given the popularity of its music and the streaming services’ interest in faith-based programming, I’m always a little surprised th

The Oscar winner plays a singer turned detective searching for her niece in an overly generic Nashville-based mystery that fails to find its footing Given the popularity of its music and the streaming services’ interest in faith-based programming, I’m always a little surprised that there aren’t more movies and TV shows about Nashville. Well, at least the idea of Nashville, the country music mecca that is perpetually struggling to define itself within and against the country at large, a place that has always been more diverse than its reputation yet still stands for a certain image of white, Christian Americana. There are plenty of enduring contradictions to mine there – the hyper-masculine men singing with their hearts on their sleeve, the Madonna-badass complex among its relatively few female stars, the suburban money in a genre ostensibly speaking to the rural common man.

Netflix seems to be aiming for some of those complexities with Heartland, a patchy neo-noir thriller starring Jessica Chastain as a washed-up former star turned vigilante detective with an axe to grind on Music Row. Chastain’s Misty Jones is certainly a thorny Nashville archetype, a female lead we might call “unlikable” painted in the stark terms of a bad country song (said with love as someone raised on country radio). The first five minutes of the nearly two-hour feature from Shana Feste, the writer-director perhaps best known for the 2010 movie Country Strong that launched Gwyneth Paltrow’s brief singing career , churn through the greatest hits of on-screen female fuck-up: teary loneliness, near-wordless pick-up of a stranger from the bar, beer bottle on the nightstand, joint in the bathroom, haunting echoes of erstwhile better days (in this case, a Grammy in an empty fridge, which does feel inspired in its bluntness).

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