Heaven Can Wait Reviews

(OK) Full of charm, great cast, fluent naiveté; Beatty a complete author, running all the film through the big mansion, through ecological, social, rcich and poor topics...

It has its moments but Heaven Can Wait feels too much like Warren Beatty’s vanity project without some of the parts being more refined and better developed. But I must confess something here and now, outside of Bonnie and Clyde and some moments in Splendor in the Grass I have never thought much of Beatty as an actor. I find him limited here, mostly staring sweetly at Julie Christie or looking befuddled by the whimsy going on all around him. Of course the surrounding film isn’t that much better, Heaven is a mostly vapid, light entertainment endeavor. How it swayed the Academy to nominate it for so many big awards is a lingering confusion to me.

I think one of the major problems with the film is that the leads are so bland that they’re easily upstaged by Dyan Cannon and Charles Grodin as a scheming wife and her lover. I’d rather spend a few hours with this comic duo than Beatty’s football stud trapped in an elderly billionaire’s body wooing Christie’s British ecologist. Cannon’s a spit-fire in the role, combing her innate sex appeal with a haphazard femme fatale. In a more straight-forward film she’d be a rival of Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai or something similar, but here it’s like Carole Lombard took over that role and brought along a screwball director with her. It’s no surprise that she got an Oscar nomination out of this film.

But I just didn’t find this film to be that funny aside from Cannon and Grodin, although James Mason and Buck Henry do get their moments to shine. When we see Beatty what everyone else really sees is an elderly man who is supposed to be dead. There’s a tremendous amount of visual trickery and gags that could accompany this basic set-up, and I felt that the film missed exploring that in favor of focusing in on the romance between the leads. Christie, who was coerced into the film by ex-lover Beatty, wasn’t thrilled to be a part of it and her indifference radiates off her lovely face. In the end, the hero gets a third go-round and a new body/appearance to go along with it and Christie to accompany him, but I would rather have walked off with the bad guys and had a lot more fun.

The premise of a man killed prematurely, then resurrected in a different body has been used in several movies. This one exploits its comedic and dramatic potential best.

Warren Beatty plays the lead as an absolute darling of a man. His character befuddles a superlatively funny supporting cast, all clearly empowered by a script that's equally rich in hilarity, eloquence, and heart.