Paradise isn't all that it seems in Hulu's Some Kind of Heaven

The Villages is a “Disneyland for Retirees”, a playground for the elderly, themed like a small town of yesteryear with a town square. The community of around 120,000 is for all intents and purposes a self-contained town and has almost anything you’d want to do from golf to rowing to acting classes to over 3,000 different clubs for the wealthy residents to spend the final years of their life in luxury and enjoyment. You don’t come to the Villages to die, one promotion claims, you come to live.

The Villages is designed as a place where all of the problems of the world don’t exist. If residents wish, they never need to leave the communities. The local newspaper and television news station produced by the community broadcasts stories about residents buying new, nice cars and the problems of the outside world are practically non-existent. Life is a non-stop party.

But the question that Some Kind of Heaven poses is this: What if, at the happiest place on earth, people still had real life, human problems that even living in a grey-haired Nirvana couldn’t fix?

The four residents: Anne and Reggie Kincer, Barbara Lochiatto and Dennis Dean all go through their own separate journey’s of hardship throughout the movie.

Anne and Reggie’s marriage struggles as Reggie’s erratic and eccentric behavior escalates thanks to a combination of drug use and mental decline. Barbara is recently widowed and still working full-time and struggling to find companionship of any kind. Dennis is homeless, living in his van and prowling the community for wealthy widows willing to take him and support him.

In each case, Oppenheim takes great care to really give us a fully-fleshed out portrait of each resident’s journey. You feel the strain that sets as Anne becomes more and more helpless to Reggie’s antics, you feel Barbara’s heartbreak and loneliness as she watches her and her late husband’s wedding on a tablet while she and her dog eat dinner together and you feel Dennis’s hopelessness when the police crack down on his vagrant ways and he’s forced to move in with a former girlfriend that, even though he doesn’t explicitly say it, you can tell he does not want to live with.

The setting really juxtaposes all of these stories well as it seems like the non-stop party of the Villages is always in conflict with the actual emotions taking place within it.

The documentary isn’t without it’s injections of hope. Barbara finds strength and confidence in her acting classes and ends the documentary with a stirring monologue that gets big applause from her fellow classmates and ends the movie with what seems to be an acceptance and enjoyment of being alone and Anne and Reggie re-discover their love and respect for each other through counseling.

Oppenheim also does a really excellent job of bringing out just the littlest details — both in the lives of the four residents and in the Villages in general. Strange things like when we’re introduced to a Villages club that’s made up of 10 to 12 different women named ‘Elaine’. They all introduce themselves one-at-a-time as Elaine and it’s honestly way weirder and creepier than you’d think.

But in the end, the biggest emotion that Some Kind of Heaven will bring out in you is empathy. These are all people near the end of their lives just trying to find some meaning and enjoyment before they die. Anne and Reggie, Barbara and Dennis each came to the Villages to live out the rest of their lives in worry-free comfort and found that real life can follow you anywhere, even in heaven on earth.