By Tom and Marilyn jozwik
SHE: “The Villages” in Florida has been described as Disneyland for seniors. The 55-plus community, which boasts some 100,000 residents (about the number of residents in Kenosha) and lies about 50 miles from Orlando, features everything its golf-cart driving citizens need … and lots more.
In “Some Kind of Heaven” director Lance Oppenheim focuses on a couple, a recently widowed woman, and an 81-year-old gold digger who lives out of his van that he parks in The Villages when he prowls for female prospects.
Early in the show, we see people enjoying the many amenities – golf, bowling, dancing, water sports, a women’s group, live music and dancing, shopping, dining and so much more. It appears to be like living permanently on vacation.
Some describe the safety—lack of ghettos and crime—in addition to the comfort at The Villages. Others say the place is “not reality.” Oppenheim chooses to display situations which don’t seem to be typical of the community’s residents. Nonetheless, the stories are compelling and offbeat in some cases, sad in others.
As “Some Kind of Heaven” goes on, you see less and less of The Villages and more on these three situations playing out on this adult playground. It becomes more a film about aging than about “The Villages.”
Grade: B+
Barbara, a recent widow, tries to combat her loneliness though surrounded by people in The Villages in “Some Kind of Heaven.”
HE: I think you’re right on target here. Stuff I read prior to viewing the documentary led me to believe I’d be seeing a portrait of America’s largest retirement community … and a rather negative portrait at that, I might add. While the last part of that sentence may be true, given the widow’s melancholy, the unlikability of the 81-year-old leech and the kookiness of his male co-star (a sometime doper whose long-suffering wife readily admits that his “sense of reality … is out there”), the film is driven more by character than by setting.
In the early going its denizens provide words of praise for a community wherein live entertainment is available every single day: “This is nirvana”; “They have everything”; “When you move here it’s like going off to college.” But the praise is tinged with gloom after a while, as when a Bermuda shorts-clad pastor points out that The Villages “is like God’s waiting room for heaven,” or when a live wire senior insists that “If you can’t enjoy your life now, you’re never going to do it.”
One “Some Kind of Heaven” background song is “Laughter in the Rain,” but neither rain nor laughter is the biggest motif in this 83-minute movie. Which is not to say the documentary, even if it didn’t deliver quite as much info on The Villages as this septuagenarian would’ve liked, was less than compelling.
Grade: B+