‘Where the Heart Is’ (R)

In John Boorman's "Where the Heart Is," home -- at least the very comfortable kind -- is one place the heart shouldn't be. The world, according to successful demolition contractor Dabney Coleman, has gone down the moral tubes and it's about time his pampered, housebound kids stepped outside the comfort zone and saw the light.

So, in this delicately satirical, squatter's-consciousness comedy, Coleman dumps unenlightened offspring Uma Thurman, Suzy Amis and David Hewlett in front of an abandoned tenement with $750 each and a wide-open future to follow.

This unlikely but highly effective union between director's director John Boorman and Touchstone Pictures (where home is where Bette Midler is) manages to combine entertainment appeal with finer things. On one level, it's an enlivening drama in which three adolescents (as well as a burgeoning cluster of other down-and-outers) discover themselves; on another, it's a glorious replaying of the lyrical touches and back-to-moral-basics sentiments that have distinguished Boorman's work, including "Leo the Last," "Deliverance," "The Emerald Forest" and "Hope and Glory," over the years.

Working once again with "Leo" cinematographer Peter Suschitsky and "Hope and Glory" scorer Peter Martin, Boorman layers the screen with pristine images and supports them with a memorable melange of contemporary and classical music.

He also coaxes uniformly strong performances out of his cast, particularly from Coleman as the beleaguered capitalist with a growing conscience, Thurman as his intellectually inquisitive daughter, Amis as the artist obliged to put her talent to use in calendar illustrations (her stunning trompe l'oeil images, by the way, created by real-life artist Timna Woollard) and Joanna Cassidy as the pampered wife with an independent, if capitalistically bewildered, mind of her own.

Christopher Plummer, in an inspired (and almost unrecognizable) bit of casting, provides great comic relief as the bum-cum-magician with an unprintable name who joins the wayward household, and off-the-wall performer Crispin Glover (of manic "River's Edge" and "Late Night With David Letterman" infamy) behaves himself and provides a nice turn as an eccentric fashion-design student.

Boorman has managed, like the artist daughter Amis, to make something great -- and commercial -- of his talent. "Heart," which was transposed from its original London setting to a New York locale, apparently in order to get Touchstone's support, delivers the requisite showtime fun (concluding with a life-affirming finale), yet still slips in a cynical, soul-searching vision of our spiritually debilitated, user-friendly world.