'Heaven Knows What': A street story with real addicts
The buzz around Heaven Knows What sounds a bit like a pitch for an organic market: Our heroin-user movie features 100 percent real addicts!
The buzz around Heaven Knows What sounds a bit like a pitch for an organic market: Our heroin-user movie features 100 percent real addicts!
And that’s certainly true.
Directors Ben And Joshua Safdie were researching a movie on the New York streets when they met Arielle Holmes, a recovering addict, and encouraged her to write about her experiences.
The memoir was never published, but it did become the basis for the Safdies’ Heaven Knows What, starring Holmes as a lightly fictionalized version of herself.
She plays Harley, a homeless woman who spends every waking moment looking for her next fix.
To that end, she leverages relationships with men (including Caleb Landry Jones), although calling these arrangements “relationships” is a stretch.
Addiction has made these characters slaves to a single imperative, and Heaven tries to find a way to to turn this dehumanizing process into a harrowingly human story.
Heaven was shot vérité style — wobbly cameras, often with a single, long-term point of view, with Altmanesque scraps of dialogue and lots of ambient noise. The Safdies mix actors and amateurs, and the goal is to show us something authentic.
But this approach often feels less like an avenue to understanding than like an artistic dead-end, repetitive and limiting.
Comparisons have been made to Drugstore Cowboy, but Heaven is not in that league. Its improvised script is no substitute for the artful, evocative writing in Drugstore Cowboy, or that film’s use of animation and music to get inside the loopy delirium of its characters.
Heaven feels more like the sort of movie that chooses vérité over the hard labor of verbal and visual composition, the tools of imagination.
Then there is the matter of Holmes, the Safdies’ discovery.
She just happens to be young, lovely, photogenic — with the slinky, streetwise carriage that Gwyneth Paltrow showed in her Flesh and Bone debut 20 years ago.
On the other hand, it seems silly to penalize Holmes for being a natural in front of the camera — and she’s apparently still clean and making another movie, so good for her.
Perhaps I’m looking for potential exploitation where there is none. But I saw Heaven soon after seeing Amy, the documentary about doomed singer Amy Winehouse.
That movie is brutally honest about the addict’s fragile state, and shows how easily it can be destroyed by the temptation to push a vulnerable talent too far.