In his fascinating documentary Some Kind of Heaven, which will be released on January 15, filmmaker Lance Oppenheim uses the largest retirement community in the world as his subject matter. Following the lives of four residents of The Villages in Florida, he tackles themes of loneliness and connection while exploring the disparity between the fantasy of the location and the reality of those living in it.
Oppenheim spoke to Screen Rant about his long-standing connection to The Villages, his goal in making the documentary, and his views on the four journeys he showcased on camera. Additionally, Screen Rant is pleased to reveal an exclusive poster for the film.
How did you find out about The Villages? What compelled you to do a documentary on this?
Lance Oppenheim: I am from Florida, and I feel like it's somewhat impossible to grow up here without hearing about The Villages. I know, when I was 12 or 13, I had seen some statistic about it having the highest rate of STDs in the Florida state. Which is still pretty crazy. And I remember, at the time, I was like, "Oh my God, that's crazy. I've never heard of anything like that." I think in my maybe more juvenile interests back then, I took some mental note of it.
Later on, that statistic was largely debunked, and I didn't really think about it so much. I left Florida, I went to college in Boston, and I started making a short film about a guy living on a cruise ship. A retiree who'd been living exclusively on cruises for 20 years; real Caribbean cruise ships. It's this idea of the lengths people go to cocoon themselves in a fantasy world, and the consequences of those actions. Those themes started percolating in my mind while working on that film.
Right around the time I finished making that film, I found there was an article that was talking about how The Villages had quickly become one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. There was suddenly 120,000 people that left the North, and they were moving in to this world that reminded them of their youth, designed to simulate the 50s and the 60s. And I just was fascinated by that, as a way to explore that uniquely American desire to escape reality. That was sort of the genesis of everything.
I think I had also seen around that time, this advertisement for The Villages. There was an infomercial they made that said "Come visit!" It was a thing they put online, and there were all of these images, and these marketing videos literally look like the opening scenes of Blue Velvet and like the suburbia of Edward Scissorhands. I was like, "This place is just begging for a film to be made about it," and I was surprised that no one else had.
I didn't know anyone there, I just went and thought I was making a short film. But I found myself in this position where I suddenly had all these great characters, and things were happening, and I was like, "Oh, God. I guess I just accidentally fell into making a feature. How do I do this?" I just took a few years, had a lot of help and a lot of great collaborators, and here we are now.
You decided to focus on some of the people that live there instead of the politics, so let's talk about some of these characters, like Anne and Reggie. What can you tell me about them?
Lance Oppenheim: I guess before I talk about Anne and Reggie, I can get into the decision to kind of make something that was more personal rather than political. We had started shooting this film like 2018 to 2019, essentially, off and on for 18 months. I don't consider this film political, just because it doesn't necessarily bring up Trump or anything like that. I was more interested in trying to find ways where I could explicitly, or implicitly, call into question the nature of this very conservative fantasy. People were delighting in the fact that, for one, the place is so white. It's like 98.3% white. There's so many visual motifs when you when you look around The Villages that reminds you that you're in this conservative Mecca that so many people are drawn to.
I was more interested in exploring the root of this line of thinking, something that I found a lot more relatable, rather than attempting to make something to condemn or serve a similar role that the news in my mind was doing a lot of. Great journalism that was coming out of The Villages. I wanted to make a film from the perspective of the people who lived there that didn't fit into the fantasy. This place is designed to give you the best time of your life, but a lot of these people that I had met were having some of the worst times of their life. The fantasy had turned into a nightmare.
I thought that if I could follow people who were going through real problems in this really unreal place, I would be able to make a more authentic and interesting portrait of the community at large. When the movie starts off, it looks like a dystopia. By the end of the movie, maybe it looks somewhere a little closer to [the middle] - maybe it's still dystopian, maybe it's a little bit more utopian. I felt like there was a whole journey your perspective could have as an audience member, from the time the movie begins to the time the movie ends, by looking through the lens of these four specific people.
Anne and Reggie are sort of the heart of the film, in some ways. They're a married couple who are very different from one another, and they move to The Villages to kind of change their lives up - a similar desire that many people have when they go there. Anne is someone who really belongs to, I'd say, the fray. She's a pickleball player; she fits the profile of a typical villager. And Reggie, the calling that he's discovered or rediscovered back in The Villages, is psychedelic drugs and Eastern spirituality, which are two things that are very not in keeping with this conservative fantasy land. People are just playing bingo, or being really active, or doing Corvette club activities, or belonging to this world where there's this synchronized aspect of everything; this collective unit where you're all moving in sync and all talking about the same things and addressing [things] the same way. And here's a guy who just couldn't bear to bring himself to actually fit into those things.
So, I thought there was a lot they had to offer about the world, not only in their relationship. The fact that Reggie and Anne had gotten there, and if Reggie had those inclinations already, being in The Villages is deeply brought him into more of a deep exploration of drug use and other things. I was interested in the root of why that was, and why that happened, and how they sort of managed to stay in relationship with one another.
Let's talk about Dennis a little bit, because he's a hustler at best.
Lance Oppenheim: Dennis is a fascinating guy. He's an interloper; he doesn't exist in The Villages proper. He moved from California to Florida on an expired license, because he got a DUI and didn't pay for it. He's someone who masquerades as a villager to sort of get what he needs, which in my mind is not sex. I think what he's after is actually companionship and a house; stability. But he's also a very tormented guy in some ways. Over the course of the film, he achieves and accomplishes more or less exactly what he's been going after, but it just isn't enough for him.
I think something that's interesting about him is that this is a guy in his early 80s - he's 83 - and he still lives a life of someone in their 20s. This desire, he describes it as comfort or freedom, but he can't have it both ways. I think there's actually something really fascinating about hearing an 83 year old say, because I feel like most representations of the elderly on screen usually are more in the comfort zone instead of the freedom zone. They're more designed to show these inoffensive adventures that these defanged elderly characters are going on. And here's a guy who is more or less a man-child, who has never grown up, and he's in his own Peter Pan-like fantasy where he's after the same exact things he's been after his entire life. He's chasing women and trying to foster some kind of hookup or romance.
But I found it fascinating to be around him. Especially given that he has a way of talking about women, which is extremely patronizing and pretty terrible, but I think he's just a survivalist. I think his manners set; he doesn't care about that, he just cares about survival. But then again, when he has the luxuries he's after, he just misses the other side of things. I found that torment to be very interesting and rich, cinematically, to explore.
The other character that we have is Barbara, and the film ends on her.
Lance Oppenheim: Barbara is a widow; she's a new widow when we first meet her in the film, and she's trying to figure out who she is without a spouse. I think she drives so much of her identity from the man she was married to. If it was her choice, I don't think she would have moved to The Villages; she very much liked her life in Boston. It was her spouse's choice, and now that he's gone, she basically has to bear the brunt emotionally and financially of trying to support herself while she lives in this place that she never wanted to in the first place.
I thought there was something really interesting about her situation, like she saw the world at first as more of a prison, or something that she really didn't want to be in. She had no interest in engaging in any of the artificiality of social conventions there, the culture there, the restaurants there. She wanted to pretend she wasn't there, and then the death of her husband really forces her to get out of her shell and go out again. She's having to re-engage with the ways of dating, which she hadn't done in a long time. Watching her do that, it's very similar to watching a John Hughes movie, where you have a character who's trying to go out with a player, and the player is interested but maybe is seeing other people and isn't transparent about what's going on in his world.
Those things were also interesting to me, because I think The Villages is a place that is designed to bring you back to that time. And I think, for better and for worse, the Barbara story really shows you that a world like that, with so many singles at that age, is very conducive to going back those ways. But it's interesting that your behavior may not totally change. You may change as a person, you may grow and you may mature, but the ways in which we engage with each other and try and start new relationships - no matter how mature they are and no matter how old you are - they still fall back on traits that we inherited or learned as kids. Which is interesting.
