One waits for the irony to be lathered on thick, but maybe it’s just as well that in Some Kind of Heaven, ironies arise gently through the stories it collects.
The documentary’s subject is The Villages, the self-governing 32-square mile Florida retirement estate with a population of 122,000. Middle-class status is assumed. The vast majority of residents are white, and they probably like it that way. “Everything here is just so positive,” one of them says. Another adds, “You come here to live, you didn’t come here to pass away.”
The Village Center is a simulacrum of small-town America as convincingly unrealistic as Disneyland’s castle. Most residents live in a desolate suburban sprawl. This Magic Kingdom for the unimaginative was conceived in the 1980s by Michigan businessman Harold S. Schwartz, honored by a statue and a plaque identifying him as “Our Founding Father.” Suffice it to say that his facsimile lacks the dignity of monuments erected for George Washington or Simon Bolivar.
Most of the happy inhabitants seem satisfied with the banality of mediocrity, an abundance of diversion, a cornucopia of consumption. The Villages contain strip malls and sports bars, restaurants, swimming pools and tennis courts—and yes, golf courses. The residents entertain themselves with limp dad rock bands and by doing figure eights in golf carts. The swingers among them go for the nightclubs. Although in denial over death, The Villages has its own hospital. To ensure insulation from the outside world, The Villages produce its own newspaper and TV channel.
For intellectual stimulation, chose from a Method acting class, a fundamentalist preacher or talk therapy. But for many, this is the Suze Ormond, Jimmy Buffett fantasy at the end of their workaholic lives. It’s like a weekend in Vegas without the gambling—but the weekend turns into years.
Discontented voices are heard. “For me, it hasn’t been the beautiful fantasy land I thought it would be,” one says. Too late in life, one retiree turns psychonaut, altering his consciousness with drugs—and goes bonkers. Another guy is a fugitive from California justice, an old-timer sleeping in his RV and hoping to bag a rich old widow before he’s escorted out of town.
Director Lance Oppenheim seldom imposes an obvious point of view but lets the residents tell their stories. He often hovers unseen capturing conversations. The New York Times figures early in the credits as the film’s co-presenter, a role that probably grew out of their coverage of The Villages as a “nation-state” unto itself. The Times noted that the residents went heavily for Trump in 2016 but shifted uneasily to Biden in 2020. Maybe news of the world penetrated the wall of denial surrounding The Villages.
