There are murals all over The Villages, unconvincing attempts to make what is young look old. Residents drive their golf carts along well-maintained lawns. They are on their way to the pool, a theater workshop or a dance party.
Few turns in The Villages. Here people live ‘straight on, until they turn the corner’. In The Villages everything is positive. The weather is radiant. The local newspaper is called The Daily Sun† there is only good news in it. It’s the kind of place that George is in Seinfeld hopes his parents will move there soon.
It’s always a holiday in The Villages. There are no noisy children in sight. And you can enter if you want, even though there is an entrance house next to the entrance, but there is a guard in there who only wishes you a good day. You can fall in love again, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get a little younger every day, until you die. It’s paradise, or, like someone in Lance Oppenheim’s movie Some Kind of Heaven (aired on Canvas on Sunday) it puts it: ‘God’s waiting room for paradise†
Some Kind of Heaven follows some elderly residents of The Villages, such as the couple Anne and Reggie. While Anne tries to surrender to the blissful nothingness, her husband rages over the complex like mad. According to Anne, Reggie is becoming ‘more eccentric’. Anyone who sees him at work is more likely to be confronted with the word ‘manic’.
And there’s Dennis, a guy who has so many traits of the classic con man that you wonder if he wasn’t made up by Chandler or Hammett or something. Dennis does not live on the complex, but in a van that he parks nearby every day. In search of a roof over his head, he spends his days by the pool, searching for lonely ladies (‘chicks’) whom he then imposes so irresistibly on that he is finally allowed to move in with them. One chat trick with which he seems to have a lot of success is the story that he was a handyman for Barry Manilow.
It obviously ends badly with chat major Dennis: he does find a woman who takes him in, but soon finds out that he doesn’t want to live together at all. Outside, The Villages may be full of beaming fun and smiling straight ahead, but life continues to be complicated and winding behind the door. Also in the waiting room for paradise there is loneliness, heartbreak, decay, fear.
When Reggie is on trial for possession of cocaine and misbehaving against a judge, Anne finds herself alone at yet another party. She swings in silence, waves her arm in the air and looks into the distance with awe.