THE SUCCESS of "Places in the Heart," Robert Benton's new film about life in the South during the Great Depression, lies with its ability to give heroic proportions to everyday events. Sunday chicken dinners, cotton harvesting, and spring storms are the stuff of this small town tragedy, and in an era when a film's success can depend upon the size of its special effects budget, such intimacy is a welcome change.

Edna Spaulding, played with wonderful strength and control by Sally Field, is a sheriff's wife who suddenly finds herself a widow when her husbands is shot by a drunken black youth. Edna, long accustomed to playing the deferential wife, must bow assume the responsibilities of keeping her family together in a decidedly masculine world of bank mortgages and cotton farming.

In addition to caring for her two children, played with an admirable lack of the cutesiness so common among children actors today, Edna takes in a blind boarder (John Malkovich) and a wondering black man (Danny Glover) who "knows everything there is to know about cotton." With this cast of misfits, Edna is determined to beat the local bank when the shadow of an unpaid mortgage threatens to tear her family apart.

In the course of learning to write a check, plant cotton and punish her son for smoking in school--all in the face of a world controlled by white males--Edna evolves from the once timid wife to a woman fully aware of the limitations and prejudices of her world. With the help of Moses, she struggles against and ultimately overcomes the veil of ignorance which her community uses to keep women and all minorities in their place

But more striking than--its "message," are the film's many vignettes of small town life. Reminiscent of Benton's work in "Kramer versus Kramer," the film reveals scenes of family life with startling simplicity and intimacy. While some of the character types are hackneyed in conception--the good hearted black man, the embittered blind gentleman--they are nonetheless made believable through skillful execution by the actors. This is indeed an ensemble performance.

Mr. Will, the blind boarder so afraid of pity he covers himself with a brittle shellac of sarcasm, slowly comes out of his shell in the warm atmosphere of the Spaulding's farm. One of the most effective scenes comes when he and Possom, Edna's young daughter, stand outside a room in which Frank, her brother, is "getting a licking." Terrified by the sounds of whipping within, Possom quietly slips her hand into Mr. Will's. The simple gesture and the expression of bewilderment and joy that slowly spreads across Mr. Will's face convey a host of emotions in a moment. Quiet scenes like these which move without constitute the film's greatest triumph.

The film's weakest point, however, lies in the ironies it attempts to convey. The pillars of the community who double as klansmen, the ignorant white businessman who is outsmarted by the uneducated black are characters already made familiar in such portrayals of the South as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Roots". Nonetheless, some of the contrasts--and this is indeed a film of deftly edited contrapuntals--are at times quite effective and convey the juxtaposition of cruelty, with suprising tenderness that is at the heart of the southern tradition.

The cinematography by Nestor Almendros is nothing short of spectacular, from the shining fields of grass to the dry, patched clapboard houses. And the scene of Moses and Edna planting cotton seed is as powerful as a Millet painting.

However, most of the credit must go to Benton who wrote and directed this somewhat autobiographical tale with customary finesse. Scenes that might have been heavy handed under another's direction are saved from melodrama by Benton's understated humor. When Moses, a born whistler in the dark, looks at the farm devestated by the storm with shutters and doors and broken glass lying everywhere, he says brightly. "Everything's little bent, but it's still here."

THE TRIALS of Depression life are concisely and pitilessly summed up by a woman who begs her husband that they move away from the town, saying "There'll always be tornadoes, everybody'll always be poor." Her very ineloquence conveys the frustrations of unemployment and failed crops better than any silver tongued politician.

These are not after all profound statements; the film is not telling us anything we haven't heard before. But its delicate picture of small town life and of an ordinary woman's endurance in the face of day to day misfortunes take the film outside of itself and raise it to the level of true art. American art.