Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Some Kind of Heaven’ on Hulu, a Peculiar Documentary About a Florida ‘Paradise’ for Retirees

Now available on Hulu after being released on demand in early 2021, Some Kind of Heaven isn’t a political documentary, at least not intentionally. Director Lance Oppenheim’s examination of retirees living in a 130,000-person Florida community known as The Villages, the film debuted at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, months before it became an infamous hotspot for political turmoil — the Dear Leader Tr*mp himself retweeted a video of one of his devotees yelling “White power!” amidst a nasty verbal exchange during a golf cart parade. So much for the place’s omnipresent slogan, touting itself as “America’s friendliest hometown,” although Oppenheim’s intention clearly wasn’t to produce a promotional puff piece, but to peel back its boomer-utopia veneer to find a little truth.

SOME KIND OF HEAVEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A woman directs a line of golf carts into an elaborately choreographed display. A boatful of senior citizens paddles in sync under the direction of a coach. A group of women coordinates a synchronized swimming machine. In voiceover, a man talks about how great The Villages community is; it has no slums or children, and “You don’t have to socialize outside the villages,” he says. We see images of pools and pickleball courts, nightclubs with dance floors and live bands, groups of bellydancers gyrating to Christmas carols, supermarkets and shops, bustling sidewalks and restaurant patios, a club consisting entirely of women named Elaine, a church service with a loud preacher on a stage populated with crazy mannequins. It’s a boomer bubble, and very, very Caucasian. The son of The Villages’ founder calls it “Disneyland for retirees.” A crazy-eyed citizen calls it “nirvana.” It’s not a gated community, a gate-booth worker says, but a “community with gates.” These are all public roads, you see. Gotcha on a technicality there!

We meet the main players in the movie, residents of this pre-Heaven suburgatory of people who chase their youth in the twilights of their lives. Anna and Reggie have been married for 47 years, but it’s not rosy; he gripes that she’s too committed to her athletic activities, but she’s been putting up with the eccentricities inherent in his quasi-spiritual explorations inspired by his regular drug use, which leads to his arrest and subsequent legal trouble. Barbara is a Boston export, recently widowed, lonely and surely still mourning; she participates in an acting workshop, tambourine lessons and singles mixers, hoping to maybe find a partner. Dennis doesn’t live in The Villages, but rather, in his van in a parking lot in The Villages, when he doesn’t get chased off; he says he wants to land a wealthy woman and has any number of qualifications for said woman’s manner and looks, despite not being much of a catch himself, considering he’s got many hallmarks of a serial fibber and con artist.

Oppenheim follows these people for a bit of their lives. Inevitably, they become more than the stereotypes we expect them to be. They become sympathetic, even. Anna’s eyes glass over when Reggie comes home, fails to acknowledge their anniversary, then asks her to leave him alone while he goes in the other room to meditate and “jack off”; she confides in a friend that she’s torn between breaking the marriage or sticking with the guy. Barbara meets a genial fella, a golf cart salesman known as the Margarita Man; they have a great time playing mini-golf together, but she looks crestfallen when she attends a Parrothead party and he shows interest in other women. Dennis reveals that he’s got an arrest warrant for a DUI in California, and he’s broke, and he’s calling people and hustling them for money and guilting them by threatening to kill himself; he seems increasingly pathetic and forlorn, gets help from the preacher, finds an old girlfriend and moves in and waits until she’s gone and lights a cigar in the house and then walks around spraying air freshener. Another day in the paradise of The Villages.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Oppenheim’s subject matter is reminiscent of pre-Interrotron Errol Morris — Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Gates of Heaven or especially Vernon, Florida. The way the film captures bizarre human behavior recalls Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. And pretty much every outre-auteur doc like this exists in the Werner Herzogian headspace at least a little.

Performance Worth Watching: Barbara looks wistfully at her tablet computer. She’s watching a video of her wedding ceremony. She’s alone. She isn’t as financially comfortable as many others at The Village, so she has to work a perfectly average boring desk job. She doesn’t say it, but she yearns for human connection, and puts herself out there, and tries new things (turns out she’s a halfway-decent actress, even). She just doesn’t give up — and you just might fall in love with her a little bit.

Memorable Dialogue: One Villages resident’s description of the community: “I don’t see the slums, I don’t see death and destruction, I don’t see murders. You don’t see a lot of children running around here either.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Yes, bellydancing to Christmas carols. I reach for hyperbole only to find it right here in my lap. Golfing, hot-air-ballooning, bowling — for Trump, in many cases, apparently, although the film avoids that, thank Jebus, because this movie has a different, less wearying story to tell, because one gets the impression that Villages-ers would vote for Reagan again in a millisecond. Oppenheim’s keen method of observation and patient photography lets The Villages betray itself as a weird-ass timewarp to boomer glory decades, a place where every day is like being on vacation — on vacation in an overly sanitized, whitewashed haven for sun-bronzed Jimmy Buffett diehards, people fawning over palm trees, owners of shitty little dogs and golfing golfers golfing their way into eternity. Seriously, eff golf forever. It’s the worst.

OK, so Barbara has one of those shitty little dogs, but don’t hold it against her. It has the audacity to hump the cat on camera as she shrugs and laughs. (“The vet says it’s just a dominance thing,” she explains.) It’s one of the few times we see her really smile in the movie. But don’t pity Barbara. Just hope she finds a friend, even if it means dancing alone for a while, which is one of the film’s indelible moments. She’s hurting. Anna’s hurting in her alienation from Reggie, who’s also hurting, perhaps in the area of mental health, although he shows signs of turning it around as he gives up THC and cocaine for tai chi golf. Yes, tai chi golf. Another ancient Eastern spiritual practice desecrated by white boomers in this movie. It’s his own goofy thing, I think, but it’s probably only a matter of time before he’s teaching it to reasonably moneyed retirees who need a 17th hobby to avoid contemplating mortality. Oh, and Dennis is hurting too, as he’s tugged between the destitution of his life of freedom and the constraints of a comfortable life. His on-again/off-again girlfriend goes over the grocery list with him, and by the look in his eyes, he’d rather be ducking the cops.

Belying the boomer stereotype, and perhaps in contrast to many residents of The Villages, Anna, Reggie, Barbara and Dennis show surprising vulnerability for the camera. Oppenheim secures some intimate footage and contrasts it with some get-a-load-of-THIS imagery, showing a few of the authentic emotional realities of this purported Floridian Valhalla/Shangri-la/Zion, and I’m purposely avoiding Christian allusions in this descriptor, thank you. The director remains observational, never passes judgment, maybe stages some scenes for cinematographical and/or entertainment value, but that’s just the ecstatic truth poking through. (Maybe he lets a few people hang themselves with their own words, which sometimes drip with implicit bias.) He’s a gifted filmmaker, he clearly knows how to gain his subjects’ trust and packages the narrative in a concise, but dense 82 minutes. It’s as eccentric as it is affecting.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Some Kind of Heaven ranks high among 2020’s best documentaries.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Some Kind of Heaven on Hulu