I had to leave Westwood on Saturday before the much-anticipated (well, at least, by me) screening of Heaven Wants Out, the long-gestating film at the center of Mark Mann’s documentary Finishing Heaven. I’ve been eagerly awaiting published reports that would clue me in on what I missed, but saw nothing for days. Finally, Craig Kennedy has weighed in at Living in Cinema. “I’d love to report that Heaven Wants Out is a belated triumph that will change how we perceive cinema,” Craig writes. “But…
…unfortunately life only seems to work that way in the movies. The truth is, Heaven is a bit of a mess, yet it’s perfectly in keeping with a certain avant-garde, low-budget guerilla style not uncommon in the day and pretty typical of more adventurous (if undisciplined) student filmmakers…It’s all pretty pretentious, but the saving grace is a certain skewed sense of absurdist humor that lets you know Feinberg isn’t being overly earnest. In the end, it’s not essential viewing, but it provides a fascinating coda to the documentary and an interesting time capsule of a certain 1970s New York scene that is now mostly a memory to the survivors.
We’ll call that a mixed review. It’s interesting to see Craig use the word “coda”; I had a number of conversations at LAFF as to whether the movie would play as a footnote to the documentary about it, or vice versa. Anyone else manage to see it and have conflicting/additional thoughts?
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First of all, thanks for steering me towards Finishing Heaven in the first place Karina and I’m sorry you didn’t get a chance to follow up with Heaven Wants Out.
I almost didn’t go to see it because I worried that it would change how much I liked the documentary. I haven’t decided yet if it has.
On one hand, it doesn’t really change the themes of the documentary. It’s still about a guy who puts so much importance into one act, he’s frozen by the fear that the one act will prove to be a failure. It’s the fear that counts, not the eventual success or failure.
One of the most powerful moments for me in the doc was Feinberg’s realization that, no matter what, it was just a movie and that he should’ve just finished it. If it bombed, he could’ve moved on to something else, but by not finishing it, it weighed him down for almost 4 decades.
The other moment was Ruby’s realization when she looked back at herself in 1970 of how beautiful she was. Regardless of whether the film had been finished, I wonder how her life would’ve been different if she’d realized it back then.