Some Kind of Retirement

The documentary film Some Kind of Heaven paints a provocative portrait of post-retirement life in The Villages, an enormous complex in central Florida. My friend Maddy—author, journalist, professor emerita, and good buddy—saw it last February at an early screening, at the Miami Film Festival. When the film became widely available on streaming services last week, she urged me to see it. It’s a compelling documentary, she told me. Besides, she wanted someone to talk it over with.

We started our conversation where the film starts, with The Villages itself. The opening shots show us the town center (designed as a nostalgic recreation of the perfect small town of the 1950s), golf-cart precision drill teams, and sunbaked older people dancing in matching white cowboy hats.

Maddy: Republican candidates love to campaign there, and just about everyone thinks it’s hilarious that they have more STDs per person than anywhere else. A few dwellings have been victims of sinkholes, swallowed wholesale by the melting earth—another point of hilarity, at least for some people.

Nancy: I hope those people were having fun with their synchronized swimming and belly-dancing. And I admire people who can be silly in group situations. But to a quiet, bookish person like me, that whole first sequence looked like one of the lower levels of hell. It made me shudder.

Maddy: Ten minutes in, and I thought, If I have to live there, bring on the cyanide. But the filmmaker eschewed the easy targets and went for something much more meaningful.

Nancy: Yes, he did. I loved how that contrived group jollity is just a backdrop for those intimate, heartbreaking portraits. Oppenheimer chose his subjects well, too: two women and two men, one married couple and two singles. Anne and Reggie are struggling to cope with Reggie’s loss of inhibition and small drug habit. Dennis, a drifter and grifter, lives out of his van, seeking out women to sponge off. And Barbara, recently widowed, works in The Villages’ office and looks for a man to share her life with. It’s a good mix.

In an interview with Vox magazine, Oppenheimer said that he wanted to focus on “people who were on the margins, who didn’t exist inside the . . .marketing brochure. When you train a camera on the Villages, all you really see is artifice. So I wanted to find real people, with real problems, in an unreal place.” He was looking to make a film that didn’t feel savagely critical, or sociological, or even journalistic, but “novelistic,” tuned to people’s interior lives.

You and I both love novels like that—novels that let us witness small, important moments in the characters’ lives and share their emotions.

Maddy: Yes, and I like documentaries that do that, too—when they do it without condescension. In this film, I appreciate that Oppenheimer gives us images of people in their later years that don’t reduce them to being cute or cognitively impaired. The film shows the four life stories with such compassion that you leave feeling …changed, or something like it. It is that feeling of gratitude that you get when you unexpectedly see something in a new deeper light.  The film is respectful, even lyrical.

It’s astonishing that Lance Oppenheimer could make this film when he’s so young! He started this project as his senior thesis at Harvard. He must have had a wise elder advising him on the project.

Nancy: Ha! I do think Some Kind of Heaven works. Oppenheimer manages to make his characters’ struggles feel representative of a loneliness that’s part of any human life.

On the other hand, precisely because it’s compelling art, it also makes me want to argue with it.

Maddy: That’s one reason we get along. Tell me more!

Nancy: Something about Oppenheimer’s portraits felt artificial or exaggerated to me. He shows us their lives only in the present day. There are no siblings or children in sight, no buddies to pal around with, no longtime friends to talk things over with. All four of the film’s subjects seem, as my husband put it, like King Lear on the heath—stripped (partly by their own actions) of the roots and connections that ground human beings. Everything around them is artificial, surface, false. Only their desperate loneliness has depth and dignity.

Maddy: It’s not easy viewing. But I was struck by how much all four main characters still want to connect.

Nancy: I agree, mostly. The two women certainly do. Anne seems determined to stick it out with Reggie, who’s having strokes and drifting into the craziness of dementia. (It made me think so much of my mom, when my stepfather descended into Alzheimer’s and all the weight of the relationship fell on her. Very painful.) And Barbara felt to me like the film’s emotional core, with her hopefulness and clear-sightedness. But Dennis—does he really want to connect? Or is he a narcissist who wants a soft place to land?

Maddy: Ah, Dennis, the sad freeloader who keeps hoping for the main chance.

Nancy:  Yet even with him, I felt his desperation and vulnerability.

Maddy: I admired Anne’s steadfast efforts to help her husband. Long ago, she took a vow, and she wasn’t about to break it.  But I felt most closely connected to Barbara, partly because she wants to return to the Northeast, partly because she was the only one who was still working.

Nancy: She seemed the most open, too. I loved that she got that tiny moment of success towards the end—the monologue in her theater class, in which she could voice her feelings through someone else’s words. And everyone applauded!

Maddy: When I saw the film at The Gables Cinema, the director was there. And guess who else? Reggie. He seemed terrific. He was no longer on the drugs, and you could see his charming, thoughtful side. It was a happy ending, and I wish it could have been reflected in the film.

I have another question for you. One of the subtexts in the film is how you live a meaningful when time and money may be running low. Did the film inspire any specific thoughts in that direction?

Nancy: Woah, big question! Too big for a little blog post. (Maybe people can start addressing it in the comments?)

Meanwhile, thanks, Maddy, for giving me the heads-up about the movie. As you said, it wasn’t easy watching. But it did make me think about the choices ahead of us all—where we’re going to live and how we’re going to live. It’s also made me glad I have the chance to pursue my genuine interests in retirement. Mostly, though, it’s left me grateful for my networks of friends and family–and for how much work and creative energy people have put into sustaining connections during this Covid period.