Take a deep breath and prepare to clutch your pearls, because you will not believe what Jean Smart’s handsome doctor husband is up to in the 1998 Lifetime movie Change of Heart. I’ll give you a hint: it involves long-buried feelings and a penis not his own. This will be a long one (no pun intended) since gay made-for-TV movies were still quite a novelty in the ’90s.
Smart’s Elaine Marshall has been with her otolaryngologist husband Jim (John Terry) since he was in medical school. Together they’ve raised high schoolers Jesse (Phillip Geoffrey Hough) and Sarah (Shawna Waldron), and built a successful hearing institute that Jim cofounded and Elaine helps manage. On the surface, everything’s perfect. But at work and home alike, Jim sure has been withdrawn lately!
Initially, Elaine doesn’t give his absences much thought. He’s a busy researcher, after all, and she has her own preoccupations, like wrestling with whether to enroll in an audiology program. When a colleague complains about shouldering Jim’s workload (in a half-baked parallel plot, son Jesse is also in trouble for truancy), she makes excuses: “He’s where he’s been this time of day for the past six months!” To which the angry physician replies “There can’t be that many books in the damn library!”
It’s in Jim’s office, while moving an appointment back onto his schedule, that she spots a suspicious note in his planner. It appears to be a hotel room number. Summoning her courage, Elaine goes there and anxiously knocks on the door. He’s in the hotel room, all right — with an attractive younger man. Zut alors! She flees in tears and is having a breakdown in their kitchen when Jim arrives. Their confrontation doesn’t go well.
Jim: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to find out this way. I was going to tell you about it. Elaine! Elaine, we need to talk.
Elaine: How long has this been going on? How many? What are you?
Jim: You know I would never intentionally hurt you. Elaine, please, listen to me. I’m not trying to justify this, I’m just trying to understand — myself, everything.
Elaine: What about me? What about AIDS?
Jim: I’ve been careful.
Elaine: Oh God, this isn’t happening! Don’t! Don’t touch me! Please! Please, please! Get away from me. Don’t you even look at me. Don’t! Just go! Go away! Go, get out!
change of Heart (1998)
While she cries (and cries, and cries), Jim retreats to his boyfriend Phil’s (Patrick Kelly) apartment. Their apparent geographic proximity to each other makes you wonder why the hotel was necessary, but the fluffy white towels and robe were admittedly nice dramatic flourishes. Over wine, a teary Jim and somber Phil have their own heart-to-heart.
Jim: You know what the most confusing thing about this is? When I decided to admit to myself that I was gay, I just assumed that would take the place of my relationship with Elaine. But it didn’t. She’s still right there where she’s always been. My feelings for her haven’t changed a bit.
Phil: What about your feelings for me?
Jim: How did it get so complicated?
Phil: Jim, what’s done is done. The pain has already been handed out. And now you have to decide where you want it all to lay.
change of heart (1998)
For a time, Jim uneasily returns to his family, sharing a bed with Elaine and performing other “manly” duties like wielding a chain saw to clear the mess when a fallen tree narrowly misses their house. (What is it about bisexual love triangles and fallen trees as clunky visual metaphors? It dates back to at least the ’60s and Mark Rydell’s adaptation of The Fox.) Elaine’s hysteria manifests itself in controlling behavior, including a demand that the children not be told he’s gay.
“You know, for years before I met you I knew I had these feelings,” Jim confesses. “All the way back to my first year in high school. But I didn’t know what to do about ’em. And then I met you and it seemed for a very long time it had been decided for me. I fell in love with you. Elaine, I swear it’s the truth. I’ve always loved you. But this other… It just never went away.” For her part, she tells her best friend Gail “I know that he’s going through hell, too. There’s part of me that wishes I could fix it for him.”
It is in Elaine’s struggle to understand this side of her husband that Change of Heart (like The Truth About Jane) veers hardest into after-school special territory. Gail tries to get her to look on the bright side: “Would you rather the other thing were a 25-year-old aerobics instructor with inflated breasts? I mean, really. He hasn’t exactly replaced you, has he?” But Elaine is squeamish about picturing gay sex and later drags Gail to a gay country and western bar to gawk at some boot-scootin’ homosexuals, where she recites the obligatory statistics about gay people in straight marriages. (And yes, there’s the compulsory scene where they pretend to be an item to ward off an interested lesbian.)
Jim’s given his own set of PSA moments, including attending support group meetings for (heterosexually) married gay men; facing homophobia from his own institute’s board of directors; and coming out to his disapproving children. “If there’s any way I could’ve made some other choice I would have, but it would have been a lie,” he tells them. “And that’s what’s wrong with everything that’s been going on lately. I have not been truthful with you. I will not apologize for being gay, but I am terribly sorry for ever having lied to you.”
Things get particularly soapy when an angsty Jesse gay-bashes the out classmate he’d previously defended against homophobic bullying. (“Next time you want to hit me, you have the guts to hit me,” Jim later tells him.) In one of my favorite moments, Elaine is approached by a friend who says “I’m so sorry! I just can’t imagine what you’re going through. If there’s anything I can do…”, as if Jim had just been diagnosed with ALS and not jazz hands.
The earnest screenplay (by Aaron Mendelsohn) could’ve used more humor, which is in short supply unless Elaine is with Gail (played with a light, sympathetic touch by Gretchen Corbett). And Arvin Brown’s direction is a little uneven here and there, particularly when it comes to the consistency of Jim’s queenier mannerisms. (One could argue it was a deliberate choice; to me, it felt sloppier than that.) But Jean Smart and John Terry give smart and sensitive performances that make Change of Heart more mature than the average Lifetime movie. Nearly 25 years after its premiere, this one is still worth seeing.
Streaming and DVD availability
Change of Heart is available on DVD as part of a Lifetime triple feature with Faith Ford’s Her Desperate Choice and Stockard Channing’s The Truth About Jane (in which Channing must come to terms with her teenage daughter’s lesbianism). It’s also available to stream on Amazon.
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… But wait, there’s more!
Was anyone else confused by all the baskets hanging from Jean Smart’s kitchen ceiling? How could her gay husband have allowed this to happen?
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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