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MADE IN HEAVEN
Rating:  ½
USA. 1987.
Director – Alan Rudolph, Screenplay – Bruce A. Evans & Raynold Gideon, Producers – Bruce A. Evans, Raynold Gideon & David Blocker, Photography – Jan Klesser, Music – Mark Isham, Visual Effects – Max W. Anderson, Special
Effects – Doug De Grazzio, Production Design – Paul Peters. Production Company – Lorimar.
Cast:
Timothy Hutton (Mike Shea/Elmo Barnett), Kelly McGillis (Annie Packert/Allyson Chandler), Debra Winger (Emmett Humbird), Maureen Stapleton (Aunt Lisa), Ann Wedgeworth (Annette Shea), James Gammon (Steve Shea), Timothy Daly (Tom Donnally), Don Murray (Ben Chandler), David Rasche (Donald Summer), Ellen Barkin (Lucille)
Plot: In the 1950s Mike Shea dives in to save the driver of a car that has gone off a bridge but drowns while doing so. In Heaven, Mike meets afterlife guide Annie Packert and the two fall in love. But their bliss is ended when Annie learns she has to return to Earth to be reborn. Mike begs the Heavenly authorities to let him return so that he can be with her and Heaven reluctantly allow him to also be reborn – but only on the same continent as she is. The two are then given until their thirtieth birthdays to find one another.
There are few genres that seem as worn-out and dated as the afterlife drama. So it is doubly a surprise when Made in Heaven succeeds in breathing life back into such a tired theme and in doing so with considerably affecting sincerity. And the emotions engendered come with an amazing degree of sincerity and straight-forward simplicity, and with no falsity of sentiment about them.
Made in Heaven is a beautifully crafted film – the 1950s scenes are photographed in stunningly textured black-and-white. The drift through the 1960s and 70s is conducted in a lovely series of intercut tableaux (even if the sight of Timothy Hutton in sideburns does seem a little hard to swallow). Best of all are the Heaven scenes, shot in impossibly real autumnal colours with the dialogue recorded in a echo-damping chamber. These afterlife scenes are filled with wonderfully incongruous surreal touches that nonchalantly sit in the background of scenes – of a couple dancing in mid-air, conversations that takes place on a park bench drifting in mid-air across a lake, of Kelly McGillis going to sleep floating above a bed of red roses. The film opens with the charming penned title – “This story might be true. You might even know some of the people.”
The film was directed by Alan Rudolph, who made acclaimed films like Trouble in Mind (1986), Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1995), Afterglow (1997) and Breakfast of Champions (1999). The script comes from the writing an occasionally directing team of Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon who wrote John Carpenter’s Starman (1984), the much-loved Coming of Age drama Stand By Me (1986) and later the fine serial killer film Mr. Brooks (2007). Alas, Made in Heaven was not a big success.
Rudolph also fills the film out with an amazing cast, including cameos from rockers Tom Petty, Neil Young and Ric Ocasek and author Tom Robbins. Ellen Barkin and Timothy Hutton’s real-life wife Debra Winger turn up, although billed only by the names of their characters. Debra Winger is virtually unrecognizable (in drag, wearing a scruffy pinstripe and her hair punk-styled and dyed orange). And while both Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis seem a little stiff at playing the real world scenes once they leave Heaven, at least Winger succeeds in being remarkably affecting in a performance of distractingly twitchiness and remarkable scruffiness.
The latter half of the film plays the interweavings of the two characters’ fates and the ironies of them as they nearly meet or bump into characters from their previous lives quite charmingly. But it is only in the end that the film seems slight when it is eventually seen that the plot consists of no more than a series of tableaux of the two characters fates that has no real dramatic payoff other than a quite abrupt ending.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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