Attending a cinema screening of the wonderful, Oscar winning ‘Nomadland’ which I reviewed in our last newsletter, I was incredibly excited to see a trailer for ANOTHER MOVIE ABOUT OLDER PEOPLE AND HOUSING. There aren’t a great deal of movies on the topic, let alone those that make it to our big screens. It felt like perhaps it’s finally our time in the limelight.
The trailer for ‘Some Kind of Heaven’ (Lance Oppenheim) promises a spectacular look at ‘The Villages’, the world’s largest retirement village, also known as “The Disney World for Retirees” in Florida, U.S.A. We see retirees living their life of “permanent vacation”, and honestly it looks kind of fun – line dancing, volleyball, golf carts, flying costumes. And also, genuinely creepy. Clubs for people who all share the same name, synchronised swimming, cheerleaders, an all too ‘perfect’ vision of America which we know to be rotten at its core.
The filmmakers encourage this unsettling feeling that something is wrong, along with the ‘cringe’ factor, for younger audiences to be appalled by their grandparents’ behaviours. The real fun, positive sides of the older people’s activities, friendships, and community, get lined up in montages of oddities, and blurred in with the dark side of the social experiment.
The actual issues that make The Villages not the “Nirvana” that they promise to be, are left unexplored. The glaring ‘Whiteness’ and lack of diversity is very obvious, but the montage allow us to see one, older Black jogger, who doesn’t get any lines. How does he feel in this American Dream? The heteronormativity of American suburbia is taken for granted.
Who can afford to live in The Village, and who is excluded? This theme isn’t addressed directly, but we do follow an older man who is living in his van, trying desperately to ‘pick up’ a wealthy lady. When things get desperate for him, though, he does have a place to go to, which he then chooses to leave. So homelessness is presented more as a ‘choice’ than the product of a system of over-inflated house prices. He just needs to stop being a player and settle down with a good “godly” woman. Another couples problems are caused by illegal drug use. The discontent, loneliness and mental health issues that could drive one to drugs are suggested but not explored.
Who works in these villages? Can they afford to retire there? With the American health system the way it is, who can afford to survive there? What are the Deferred Management Fees like? Is it like the Hotel California?
For film screening in 2021, bigger issues are also missing. How did The Village deal with covid? God help them to survive Hurricane Ida, and climate change in low-lying Florida. Still, two stars for begging all these questions, even though the movie didn’t actually ask them. At least we aren’t missing out too badly on this film with the cinema being closed.