When I learned that Heaven Knows What was based on the personal experiences of the star, I felt really bad for not liking it. But I must review the film, not her life. I have sympathy for the experiences of anyone living on the street, dealing with drugs and violence daily. I’d have that sympathy with or without a film. I could tell the film was an attempt to be real, but failing to engage beyond “look how bad it is on the streets.”
Harley (Arielle Holmes) is a homeless drug addict in New York. There are suicide attempts, scams, deals and violence but none of it feels like a narrative the synopsis of which would benefit a review. In that, perhaps Heaven Knows What is like real life. Stuff just happens. It’s not all tied together in a neat plot.
The first half of the movie is a collage of raw street talk, a lot of overlapping swearing because the characters can’t really articulate what they’re feeling, let alone express what they want in a semi-constructive fashion. One of the only supportive lines of dialogue is literally, “Honestly, my mother killed herself from suicide.” “Suck my clit, asshole” is more indicative of the screenplay. I’m sure both are things people really said but those punctuations in the film seem intentionally confrontational.
We don’t necessarily need a movie to show us that this is how street kids behave. The translation to film actually makes it more abrasive in this case. The film’s score ranges from aggressive trance music to mellower sounds like a synthesizer is blowing bubbles underwater. A dreamy voiceover narrates one scene, but not consistently, so the technique feels like what you see in student films.
It gets better about 45 minutes in when they start to speak in complete sentences, and wait their turn to talk. A brief hustle begins and carries the second act. Some of the targets Harley and her gang hit are different as far as heist movies go. There’s violence too in the form of, well, not so much a turf war, but just individual wars between different homeless guys. So that’s something to hook into. We also see a bag of poop hurled from a moving train. I admit, that did make me realize I take my indoor plumbing for granted.
Drugs are a factor, and I’m sure the experience of addiction is different for everyone who has experienced it. Cinematically, you have the Requiem for a Dream/Trainspotting artful depiction of it. Here in Heaven Knows What it’s the raw arguing over how many bags of drugs you can borrow in advance. There’s a case to be made for everything in between too, the hyper coked out Goodfellas or the whimsical Inherent Vice approach. Perhaps drug use is the mundane daily argument Harley has with her dealer. The amount of screen time it eats up just didn’t engage me.
I believe that rough first act is in some ways a test to challenge us to care for these characters. Look at me, the film gave me ample time to judge Harley and her crew, and then turned that into empathy after a sequence of events. That’s a big game to play narratively and I don’t think the filmmaking technique is quite there to deliver it, even though the actors are all game.
If Holmes wrote a book about her experiences which then got made into a movie, that actually shows a lot of hope for people in her situation. I got so sense of hope from the movie. All I saw was a raw expose about how these characters live in despair with no potential, with a film technique that made it seem more pretentious than it needed to be to make its point.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
