Finishing Heaven begins in a bodega. A tall, thin, older woman with fire engine red dyed hair and a drawn face saunters to a table in the back of the deli section to greet a shifty-looking mustachioed character with whom she is clearly very well acquainted. They kiss hello, and almost immediately fall into an argument about matters that date back nearly four decades. it’s a bizarre scene, for a lot of reasons, but initially, I couldn’t get beyond the setting: why are these two in a bodega? They didn’t come for the food––she walked in with a half-empty venti Frappucino, and a wide shot reveals that the deli’s heat lamp trays are empty, thus signifying that it’s either very early or very late. If you were to meet an old lover to argue about old Warhol superstars and reminisce about Max’s Kansas City, would you really do it in front of the soft drink case at your circumspect corner grocery?
Director Mark Mann presents us this scene with judiciously inserted explanatory on-screen titles, through which we learn that the man’s name is Robert Feinberg, and the woman’s is Ruby Lynn Reyner, and the two were a couple in the 70s and are now reuniting for the first time in over 30 years to talk about finally making some progress on Heaven, a film which he directed and she starred in but he never finished editing. In spite of this exposition, overall it feels like we’re being thrown into a fire, and it’s exciting––sometimes you see things happening in Manhattan that you can’t quite explain and simply must accept, and you come to understand that it’s just one of the ways that the city humbles you into acknowledging that you do not control the universe. But then we cut to an exterior shot of the deli’s incongruously sunny exterior, and a title slowly fades up at the bottom of the screen: “Formerly Max’s Kansas City.”
It’s a laugh line, but it’s also an object lesson in how the director will proceed to tell this story. He asks us to jump straight in to one aspect of his subjects’ lives, and just as we think we have a handle on what’s going on, he pulls out and unpacks another box, unveiling a further facet of who these people are and what their relationship is all about. It’s a film that, on the top level, is about two extreme personalities trying to finish a film, but on a deeper level, it’s about the way lives slip out of control, dreams slip out of reach, and the incredible way that massive egos can take repeated beatings and continually bounce back, worse for wear but still resillient.
