Some Kind of Heaven

For many, the concept of retirement is, well, just that: a concept. An abstract idea longed for as some future eventuality, but ultimately unattainable, like universal health care in America. But if you have successfully yanked that brass ring on your golden parachute, perhaps you can spend your twilight years at the Villages, a sprawling retirement community north of Orlando, Florida. Boasting a population of 130,000, it is a baby boomer nirvana, a sustained collective dream of Fifties Americana, with hot rod golf carts zooming by densely placed identical houses, and smiling seniors engaging in all manner of leisure activities. And it is where documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim has set his first feature, profiling four of its denizens, as they search for Some Kind of Heaven.

For Dennis, that means finding a rich woman to shack up with. An aging lothario whose motto, “Live fast, love hard, die poor,” is reaching its conclusion, he lives surreptitiously in his van on the community grounds, a different parking lot each night. On the lam from a DUI warrant, his prospects are becoming increasingly tenuous. A recent widow, Barbara has been living in the Villages for 12 years and works in the facility’s rehab and nursing department. She longs to return to her hometown of Boston, but the depletion of her life savings has made that impossible. Lonely and listless since her husband’s passing, she nevertheless attempts to engage with the myriad social events available to the 20,000 singles in the community, but there is a bemused skepticism shadowing her participation. And then there’s Anne and Reggie, a couple whose marriage of 47 years has them living separate lives. She enjoys tennis and a quiet domestic life, but Reggie has discovered his inner bohemian and spends his days in a fugue of yoga and mind-altering drugs in a quest for self-actualization. His unruly behavior, peppered with incomprehensible rants, seems quaintly amusing at first, in the “grandpa is high” tenor, but it is clear there are serious cracks in their relationship, and tensions mount as Reggie faces a marijuana and cocaine possession charge.

Oppenheim uses these outliers to investigate various themes of grappling with age, specifically the reconciliation between our self-delusions and the reality that we exist in. For the Villages is just an elaborate fabrication that encourages those delusions, because who doesn’t want to live out their golden years in some heightened simulation of a nonexistent bygone fantasy land? Ignorance is bliss. Oppenheim is a talented filmmaker, who is acute in finding seemingly small details that reveal the essence of a person. How Dennis continues to lie to his mother on the phone after all these years, claiming to still be working in California. How Barbara has five calendars hanging in a row on her wall like charming jail cell scratches. And Anne, poor Anne, whose stoic countenance at Reggie’s juvenile behavior is heartbreaking to behold. Some Kind of Heaven effortlessly blends humor and pathos into a memorable and at times unsettling study on where life’s trajectory might land us, and that is a concept that deserves more than mild contemplation.

Some Kind of Heaven is available now as a virtual cinema release.