Herald rating: *
Cast: Martin Donovan, Danny Edwards, Richard Schiff, Patrick Malahide, Joanna Going, Karl Urban
Director: Scott Reynolds
Rating: R18
Running time: 103 mins
Opens: Now showing Rialto
Review: Peter Calder
There's style to burn in Reynolds' second feature, but the substance is problematic to say the least.
Even setting aside the continuity queries
(the film's multicontinental provenance means that cars switch from righthand to lefthand drive as fast as you can bellow "Cut!"), this seedy, hackneyed thriller is much more concerned about how it looks than how it comes across.
To be fair, it does, at least for long moments at a time, look damn good. Reynolds, whose debut feature The Ugly explored the relationship between a serial killer and his therapist, shows considerable technical control. But for all its mid-Pacific pretensions, Heaven is dogged by the problem that bedevils too much local product - a script given the go-ahead when it should have been regarded as a work in progress.
Donovan (a staple member of Hal Hartley's casts) plays Robert Marling, an architect who has made something of a mess of the plans for his own life. His wife Jennifer (Going) has left him and is getting it on with her psychiatrist (Malahide, the desiccated Casaubon of television's Middlemarch). Meanwhile, Marling is renovating the gloomy nightclub of Stanner (Schiff), a Scorsesian psychopath with whom he plays life-or-death card games, assisted by Heaven (Edwards), a transvestite clairvoyant whose predictions considerably improve her employer's success at the table. Stanner's club is called Paradise. Unsubtle irony is this film's long suit.
When Marling, rather by accident, rescues Heaven from a nasty rape in an alley, she transfers her fortunetelling allegiance to him. Stanner is not amused.
Reynolds' debt, if not his allegiance, to Quentin Tarantino (remember him?) drips from every frame of this selfconscious nonsense, and though he flips back and forth through time with some deftness, viewers who can remember Antonioni's Blow Up almost 35 years ago may feel they have seen it before.
Production design and cinematography and editing combine to create an atmosphere of unease and the performances are more than competent.
But it knits together poorly and engrosses barely at all.
