Retirees form a cheerleading squad in “Some Kind of Heaven.” Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The world’s largest retirement community sits across three counties in Central Florida. It’s called The Villages, also known as “Disney World for retirees.” Men and women from across the country retire at the Villages so they can enjoy its pools, nightclubs, karate classes, nail salons, and restaurants.
Some 130,000 seniors live there, enough to land The Villages in the Guinness Book of World Records for the world’s longest golf-cart parade, and enough to wield serious political power in an important swing state. The Villages may have helped former President Donald Trump win Florida in 2016 and 2020.
Some Kind of Heaven Review: The Seniors Aren t Alright thetelegraph.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thetelegraph.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A scene from Some Kind of Heaven by Lance Oppenheim. (Courtesy Magnolia Pictures)
Dennis Dean in Some Kind of Heaven by Lance Oppenheim. (Courtesy Magnolia Pictures)
Richard Schwartz in Some Kind of Heaven by Lance Oppenheim. (Courtesy Magnolia Pictures)
Director Lance Oppenheim poses for a portrait to promote the film Some Kind of Heaven at the Music Lodge during the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2020, in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP)
NEW YORK They say opposites attract. Lance Oppenheim was still just an undergraduate at Harvard University when he began working on “Some Kind of Heaven,” a film about senior citizens living in The Villages, Florida the world’s largest retirement community. Mixing comedy, drama, tragedy, and beauty, this very “cinematic” documentary is a treasure, and also, no doubt, the harbinger of a great new voice.
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Watching
Some Kind Of Heaven, an entrancing new documentary about life in a massive Florida retirement community, the mind may drift to a whole library of movies about the plastic unreality of suburban life. Partially, that’s because the film’s director, 24-year-old Lance Oppenheim, plainly takes some cues, visual and tonal, from touchstones of the genre. But it’s also because his subject, the so-called “Disney World for retirees,” was essentially built from the same psychic blueprint as those films: the nostalgic dream image of an unblemished American yesterday, a boomer paradise more imagined than remembered. What Oppenheim has found, in his first feature film, is a real place every bit as art-directed as