HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT
Radius-TWC
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for CompuServe ShowBiz. Databased on Rotten Tomatoes.
Grade: B-
Director: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie
Screenwriter: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, Ronald Bronstein
Cast: Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry-Jones, Necro, Buddy Duress
Screened at: Review, NYC, 4/30/15
Opens: May 29, 2015
Every day in America, 2,000 mostly young people start on the road to addiction. These numbers are probably correct, give or take a thousand, but you’ve got to wonder: don’t people see movies about the dangers of dope? Slogans, like “Don’t be a dope?” News items like the recent death of Philip Seymour Hoffman? The movie industry has been sending out warnings at least as far back as the classic for the genre, Otto Preminger’s 1955 “The Man with the Golden Arm,” in which a strung-out junkie with a crippled wife and card sharps trying to bring him down tries to cope with daily stresses. And let’s not forget “Kids,” wherein Larry Clark in 1995 shows us one day in the life of teens who spend their time smoking and drinking.
“Heaven Knows What” has a looser structure than even “Kids,” but directors Josh Safdie and Benn Safdie must have been intent on showing us not a classic narrative with loose connections tied up but a laid-back look at the several days or weeks in the lives of a group of young people addicted to heroin. These are street people who had probably been thrown out of their homes only to wind up shoplifting pharmacy items for resale to kiosks in New York, talking trash to one another, and in the case of the principal performer, Arielle Holmes as Harley, the picture uses at least one authentic drug addict who therefore knows whereof she speaks.
I don’t know any young person who would like to lead her kind of life, yet I suspect that teens may be willing to start off on the road to heroin addiction as a dare, as though to say, “Don’t worry: I can control the habit. I won’t get addicted.” Harley has relationships with a few men who appear just as badly off as does she, but the most self-destructive point made by this movie is that when her love interest, Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones) told her that if she really loves him, she would slash her wrists, she does just that. And she is laughed at by her “boyfriend,” who now thinks that she is a bigger jerk than she. Fourteen stitches at Bellevue later, she is on the street again, shooting up, shoplifting, chatting aimlessly with Mike (Buddy Duress), a motormouth drug dealer who may really care for her.
She begs in a drugged, drunken stupor, she hits the crowd on New York’s Upper West Side for “fifty cents,” she hangs out in Mickey D’s and other fast food joints. She is thrown off a bus to Florida which she takes along with b.f. Ilya after Ilya mysteriously demands to be let out midway while Harley is sleeping. She plays the part convincingly, and that’s where her addiction pays off for her.
The structure is too loose to attract a general audience except for those of us who go to the movies for the soundtrack, and Isao Tomita’s music is probably being considered already by the awards groups. Sean Price Williams shoots the movie with its washed-out colors, a film that is difficult to watch but which is reasonably involving largely thanks to Arielle Holmes’s performance.
Unrated. 95 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – C+
Acting – B
Technical – B
Overall – B-
