---
title: "Some Kind of Heaven (2020) review"
description: "The Villages bills itself as the happiest place to retire in America. Oppenheim points a perfectly still camera at it and waits for the smiles to fall."
url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/some-kind-of-heaven/
---

![A still from Some Kind of Heaven (2020)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/some-kind-of-heaven/backdrop.webp)

# Some Kind of Heaven (2020)

Sep 29, 2026 | 3 min read | Rated 4 out of 5 | Dir. Lance Oppenheim | Rewatch

The Villages bills itself as the happiest place to retire in America. Oppenheim points a perfectly still camera at it and waits for the smiles to fall.

I first saw Some Kind of Heaven in early 2021, deep in the worst of COVID, when a movie about old people sealed inside a gated bubble hit a little close. I went back to it last night because Primetime, Oppenheim’s first narrative feature, is waiting for me tomorrow, and I wanted to remember what his eye looked like before Robert Pattinson got anywhere near it.

It looks unreal. Every frame of The Villages is centered, symmetrical, and lit like a postcard someone is about to be sad in front of. David Bolen’s camera barely moves, and Ari Balouzian’s harp-heavy score sounds like it drifted in from a 1950s melodrama. I still don’t understand how a nonfiction crew got images this controlled out of people who were just living their lives.

Oppenheim holds on people after they’ve finished talking: the long awkward pause, the mournful stare past a perfect lawn at nothing in particular, a wife looking at her husband one beat too long. Almost nothing important gets said out loud. It all lives in the glances, and he trusts you to read them.

In five years I had forgotten most of the details, especially Dennis Dean. Dennis is an eighty-something drifter living out of his van, working the pools and dance floors of The Villages for a wealthy woman who will take him in. I know twenty-two-year-old fuckboys running this exact play. Watching a broke octogenarian run it is something else entirely. When a relationship finally offers him a roof, he can’t stand what it would cost him in freedom, and he’d rather keep the van. He is a con man, and a pretty sorry one, and something in that man’s head is badly broken. The film never tries to fix him or excuse him.

Then there’s Reggie Kincer, slipping away from reality in real time while Anne, his wife of almost fifty years, tries to keep the marriage upright. I’ve watched a version of Reggie play out next door. There’s a specific kind of older white man who is slowly losing his mind but has never once been told no, so he has no equipment for hearing anyone who tries to help. It’s sad. It’s also infuriating, and I honestly don’t know that I’d have Anne’s patience.

This is my favorite kind of documentary, the slice of life that peels back the lawn. The Villages sells itself as the happiest retirement community in America, and those beautiful lawns turn into a nightmare the longer you stare at them: a conservative boomer theme park where the loneliness is professionally landscaped.

The film also brought out all of my resentment toward boomers. The oldies-radio nostalgia on a permanent loop. The terror of anything new. The staggering wealth being poured into golf carts and happy hours instead of anything that might outlive them. The total inability to engage with a civil society beyond their own shitty little narcissistic bubble. Oppenheim is far kinder to his subjects than I would be.

It’s an expertly made documentary. Oppenheim finds the sad, strange people living inside a glossy American fantasy and lets the camera sit with them until the fantasy gives out. Tomorrow night I get to see what he does with Chris Hansen.

Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/some-kind-of-heaven/)

## Works on My Machine

Get the next post by email. My newsletter covers homelab builds, AI tools and open source, and it goes out when I have something to say.

It's free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. You'll get an email to confirm first.

![Joe Karlsson at his desk, chin on hand, with a microphone in front of him](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/about/collage/studio.webp)

Joe  
Karlsson

I write about my homelab, AI tools, databases, and the weird stuff I build on the side.

[More about me →](https://www.joekarlsson.com/about/)

[Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/joekarlsson.com) | [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joekarlsson/) | [GitHub](https://github.com/JoeKarlsson)