Movie Review: Some Kind of Heaven Analyzes Florida’s “Paradise”

I don’t know how the world deals with aging. In Latinx culture, our elders are like gods, and it would be considered sinful and ungrateful to even have the idea of sending them away. I, literally, remember one man, in my town of Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, becoming a neighborhood pariah for putting his father, with dementia, in“un asilo,” which translates, in English, to “an asylum,” but what nursing homes are called over there. That translation is not by chance, and Lucas Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven helped me understand why.

Out on VOD January 15, Some Kind of Heaven is a stunning, hopeful, and tragic look at what it means to get old in America, and how we all grasp at the superficiality of youth. Let’s be honest! America has a youth obsession, and if you are 50 and do not look 25, then you have let yourself go. Yet, for the residents of The Villages, youth is more internal, which is why it feels so elusive and evading. Youthfulness is based on the big questions like, “What is joy? What is love? What is stability?” It is not without irony that these are the questions that plague younger generations, but this film is about how getting older does not, exactly, give you the response.

For an outsider, The Villages, a retiree residence in Florida, feels like a slice of apple pie cut from 1950’s perfection. There is where you go when you have worked hard, lived a good life, and deserve to rest and do fun things like, dance lessons, golf, play board games with new friends, and have public sex and do drugs. Okay, that last part may surprise people, but that is part of the attraction to The Villages for its elders: it is a weird blend of sweet and salacious. It is a place where elders give their final push on the boundaries they kept in their life, but, for some, it’s not that they “held back.” They lived great lives, but The Villages has made them enter an existential crisis: one where “moving forward” is an ambiguous term.

If there is one thing about “being young” that, definitely, pervades in American culture, it is bigness and the feeling that every step forward has to be grandiose. For the retirees of The Villages, everyday has to be an adventure, of which most of them would sneer at my enjoyment of sitting on the couch, binge-watching tv, and eating WAY too many sweets. How could I possibly do such an act when I can take a Zumba or acting class? In their little “village,” there is no such thing as rest or sadness: not when you have entered the final chapter of your life. Such things feel wasteful, which is why the film’s four subjects feel like hues of grey under Oppenheim’s stunning, colorful cinematography.

With shots as bright and neon as a Warhol painting, Barbara, Dennis, Reggie, and Anne add shade to a world desperate to clutch a sunny disposition. Reggie is experimenting with hard drugs and acting like entering retirement is like entering Woodstock. Yet, his experimentations start changing his demeanor, landing him into trouble, and distancing him from his wife of 47 years: Anne. Her building heartbreak is palpable as she questions whether she is losing her life partner and perceived, emotional stability to a man losing control over himself so “late in the game.” Meanwhile, Dennis is a “hippie” bachelor that wonders whether he did right avoiding the “family life,” while still yearning to be nomadic: in both women and places. Then, there is Barbara: a widow who feels trapped in a high- school for 80 year olds. She is trying to connect with her new world but is feeling the pangs of social anxiety and The Villages’ “Go Big or Go To The Grave” mentality. In the end, their stories combine to reveal that wisdom does not, necessarily, come wi