A Little Trip to Heaven | Review

Kormakur doesn’t claim stake in bogus million-dollar crime plot.

God forbid you lose a loved one – and if that day ever comes let’s hope that the person had enough foresight to insure themselves against injury, and in the most extreme of situations…death. A Little Trip to Heaven looks at the good deeds that people do but sometimes the best intentions aren’t always the most warranted choices. Icelandic helmer Baltasar Kormakur explores the noirish world of deceit, deception and corruption with an Americanized backdrop.

The insurance business is like any other: profit driven, corporate greed makes it a difficult task to collect one’s winnings. Even more so when the person (the key figure played by Forest Whitaker) holding your check acts more like a casino dealer than a compassionate insurance broker. Following trails of false claims has made this professional void of emotions, but when he finds himself fully immersed in a bizarre fraudulent claim with a thorough examination of a twisted family tree, the usually cold-in-nature agent finds himself to be a little less scrupulous about who gets to have the Benjamin Franklins.

Conscious visual choices make the introductory stage of the film intriguing; the somber darker tones certainly places the plot in the perfect mindset but the problem lies mostly in how the narrative holds one too many easy coincidences, far too many highly implausible motives and the foreseeable tug from underneath the rug in the film’s conclusion. Sorely missing is a visibly more alluring protagonist and a less caricatured antagonist and Julia Stiles’ victimized abused mother character is undeveloped. Clearly she once lived a different life as a partner in crime and that would have been an interesting avenue to explore.

Kormakur loses some of the frigid Scandinavian charm that is so appealing in his young body of work (101 Reykjavík and The Sea), with A Little Trip to Heaven he attempts to challenge morals and principles, but weak characters, horrible dialogue exchanges and the a storyline which could have used more tweaking could have made this the best film about false insurance claims ever. At least the car accidents are some of the most beautiful pieces of poetry since PTA flipped an ambulance in Magnolia.

Sundance 2006.

Rating 2 stars