2021 #2: Some Kind of Heaven
in which I do that thing again and write a bunch of flowery stuff about Florida
The silhouettes of palm trees, their pointy, elongated fronds wisping in an early evening breeze like wiry strands of outgrown salty hair. Choppy chambray water whooshing around weathered channel markers, their splintered wood darkened by each passing wave, in a lake so vast the land on the other side is little more than a blurry, stunted mound of dark green. The condensation accumulating on a glass of rosé as it’s being held on a back patio that’s little more than a screened-in square slab of painted concrete. The sunsets, goddamn, the sunsets, at the height of summer when the sun doesn’t begin its descent behind the horizon until well after nine o’clock, and that vibrant sky blue gives way to a paler matte, with layers of lavender, coral and golden yellow below it. I never understood the appeal of church, but witnessing that natural phenomenon in all its unrivaled beauty, I could understand why some people believe in God.
When I see these things as moving images on a screen, I feel them deep in my bones. A part of me will always yearn for those sweaty nights and how, in the moment, they seemed to last forever. Only someone like me could watch a film as dizzying and sad as Some Kind Of Heaven and derive profound wistfulness from it, and only a fellow Floridian—director Lance Oppenheim—could make a film that contrasts that beauty with the ugly emptiness of reality. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. But then that’s the point, isn’t it? People who grew up somewhere else see these postcard images of towering palm trees surrounded by expertly manicured grass, or pearl white, sandy beaches, and they think to themselves while sitting in their rowhome, bundled up and not thinking rationally because it’s irrationally still 40 degrees in April, that’s paradise. People like me who did grew up in Florida and know from first-hand experience that the superficial beauty, as jaw-dropping as it can be, shrouds Florida’s many problems: corrupt Republican politicians and their big tent of socially conservative retirees, QAnon morons, coastal active military meatheads and the contractors who depend on their fealty, Palm Beach millionaires with entirely white mansions, jetski dealership dipshits, and inland rednecks; exploding poverty ignited by a accelerating cost of living; impending environmental disasters in the forms of stronger, more frequent hurricanes, flooding and irreversible sea level rise that will completely wipe out cities like Miami, possibly in our lifetimes. We know all of that, but the second we see that sky and those trees we think, goddamn, that’s fucking paradise.
That intoxication is the ideation for a place like The Villages, the setting of Some Kind of Heaven. It’s that postcard ending, steeped in nostalgia for a time, say the 1950s or 60s, where everything was clean, non-threatening and bright white. “I don’t see the slums, I don’t see death and destruction,” one resident says near the beginning of the film. It’s a sentiment likely shared by many who inhabit this master-built community of nearly 130,000 people, the subtext of course being, “because I don’t see these things here, they no longer exist.” It’s blissful ignorance manufactured in its final form, a place where people can live out their final years pretending that the outside world, their previous existence, was, and is, illusory. 60 miles southeast, Walt Disney had miraculously converted acres of uninhabitable swampland into a sprawling resort that draws millions of visitors each year, most of whom never leave the conglomerate’s property except to head back to the airport, because it’s been made abundantly clear that they don’t need to leave. The fact that there’s an actual large American city next door with its own history, culture and food that’s worth exploring is immaterial. Everything they want to make your vacation magical is already right here. Why experience actual diversity when the manufactured diversity feels basically the same and is much easier to seek out? That’s another thing The Villages lifted from Disney: the fake history. The shots of the town’s main street in this movie could double for those in the Magic Kingdom, that is, if golf carts were allowed inside the park. There’s painted-on cracks on the commercial buildings, weathered clock towers and ornamental water pumps adorning the streets. There are plaques commemorating people that never existed and events that never took place. The newspaper, radio, and television owned and operated by the city with an unsettling insularity. Residents of The Villages have decided that they have had enough of real life, and it’d be hard to blame them if not for the fact that most of them had the means to retire just about anywhere and decided to move there.
Despite that, Oppenheim deftly contrasts the fantastical with the real in the film, by focusing on residents whose existence at the Villages hasn’t been all cotton candy skies and strong margaritas. There’s Reggie, a non-conformist with a tenuous grip on reality, a love of tai chi and a predilection for drugs, and his wife of 47 years Anne, a steadying presence doing her best to allow her husband to explore his impulses while both worrying about him and bottling up what effect his actions are having on their marriage. As a viewer, it’s easy to get caught up and entertained by Reggie’s antics at first, but by the end, it’s hard not to feel for Anne, a woman with a good heart who loves her husband but is also not experiencing her idea of a sunny retirement surely advertised in the brochures. Then there’s Barbara, recently widowed and alone, forced to work full-time and badly wanting to return to her native Boston but hamstrung financially by her husband’s death just a few months after they moved to The Villages. Shy and still grieving, but knowing that she needs to try to move on, she meets an affable golf cart sales salesman (and Parrothead) named Lynn who encourages her to come out of her shell ever so slightly, but is clearly not as interested in a monogamous arrangement as she is. Finally, we have Dennis Dean, a wiry, handsome, tanned 81 year-old with a mostly full head of white hair, piercing eyes and a kind, soft-spoken voice. Dennis is technically not a resident of The Villages; he lives in a van just outside the compound’s property and enters daily, hoping to meet a rich woman who will take him in to live out his final years in relative stability. He’s undeniably charming, and his tactics border on sleazy, but he’s a tragic figure, craving independence despite his claims to the contrary. A series of bad luck and poor decisions have led him to a life as a drifter, and it’s made relatively clear that, for all his good qualities, he’s his own worst enemy.
Oppenheim gained intimate access to the lives of these people and because of that, Some Kind Of Heaven is much more dramatic, cinematic, and character-based than a lot of other documentaries that may lean heavily on talking head segments or archival footage. Simply, it’s shot and directed like a scripted movie, with an artistic focus on facial expressions, symmetry, and proximity. Being a Floridian himself, Oppenheim equally focuses the film’s cinematography not only on those aforementioned natural beauties but on the suburban sprawl that plagues The Villages and much of the Sunshine State. Akin to Edward Scissorhands, these perfect, nearly identical, stucco houses with pristine green lawns on the surface convey a degree of safety and normalcy, but anyone who grew up in a development like that would instantly tell you it’s all a facade and that below everything there is pain, unhappiness, and claustrophobia, much of it bottled up, shaken, and ready to explode under the hot Florida sun.
James and I obviously do not usually podcast about movies such as Some Kind Of Heaven, but as Floridians I thought we could offer a unique perspective on its content and message, so we recorded a bonus pod about it. Here it is (sorry for the choppy audio):
If you like podcasts about action movies, maybe check out the other episodes. We’ve been having a lot of fun with it.
Here’s this week’s playlist, which is admittedly a lot darker and heavier than last week’s. I hope you’ll check it out, and again, pretend it’s a mixtape and listen to it in order. Thank you.