A Little Trip to Heaven (2005)

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur directs "A Little Trip to Heaven", a noir inspired drama starring Forest Whitaker as Abe Holt, an insurance agent tasked with investigating a mysterious death in small town America.Bizarrely, the film's shot in Iceland but takes place in the United States. This gives the picture an unconventionally hyper-stylised look, with moody skylines, rain drenched locales, and lots of blacks, greys and grubby browns. The interesting-faced Julia Stiles plays a cross between your typical noir femme-fatale and damsel in distress. Whitaker sports an unconvincing Minnesotan accent.The film contains a wonderful opening act – very atmospheric - but quickly falls apart. You can almost pinpoint exactly where it goes off the rails: Whitaker, who plays a lonely, shy, work-obsessed investigator, is approached in a bar by a man-hungry obese woman. Too timid to push her away, he finds himself dancing with her, their lonely, chubby bodies swaying to the sound of a midnight jukebox. Unfortunately Kormakur cuts away from the moment as soon as it starts. The rest of the plot proceeds in a similar manner, Kormakur uninterested in dwelling on more interesting, original moments, or even his central character, and too preoccupied with rushing through his familiar tale.6.9/10 – Worth one viewing.

I love the characters that Forest Whitaker usually portrays in his movies: soft einzelgangers who are balancing on the thin line between good and evil. In this flick he's playing an agent for an insurance company who tries to dodge off the claims of their clients. He does a pretty swell job, scrupulous and efficient. But then he stumbles upon a messed up couple who are trying to file a claim over a dead brother. Our protagonist feels that there is something wrong, and he dives in the lives of the two to find any sleaze and dirt. And, as expected , he does find something that can stir things up.This movie reminded me of ''Fargo'' and '' A simple plan ''. Like in those flicks, ''A little trip...'' deals with the brutalities that people will do to each other out of pure greed. It's also about the cruel way of thinking that a life insurance can make up for the loss of a human life, and how insurance companies like you to believe that. It's a modern film noir with an excellent cast, a beautiful soundtrack and atmospheric sequences in the rain or snow. Maybe the tone is a bit too sad and nihilistic for the big crowd, it definitely deserves more than the meager 6 it's receiving here.

A little trip to heaven is an odd film, not good though not particularly bad. It's a film that survives on the merits of an excellent cast and in particular the performance of Forest Whitaker. He play a quiet, reserved inquisitive insurance investigator. His character Abe has so many ticks and tocks and little mannerisms that it's a pity he's never fleshed out, Abe is a good man but why does he do what he does? Why is he single if he's so sympathetic? And why does he care about Isolde? None of the questions aroused are answered. There is no mystery here. The story is okay, excluding some footage earlier on would have been awesome, for instance if you left the audience in doubt for a longer time it would have been much better. The film just never pulls you in, it keep the viewer at a distance, even with all it's foibles this could have been an amazing film if they could have simply fleshed out Whitakers character. The ending sucks too, pure suckage, inexplicable actions taken and consequences garnered...

A LITTLE TRIP TO HEAVEN is a strange little Indie film by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, a young director with some very fine ideas but with a script (written both by the director and Edward Martin Weinman) 'that is so spongy that the impact of the film relies on the considerable qualities of the cinematic images. Filmed primarily in Iceland with some scenes in Hastings, Minnesota, the mood is dank and dark and cold - and so is the story.We first meet insurance investigator ('adjustor') Abe Holt as he listens to his boss Frank (Peter Coyote) explain to a new widow why she will not receive full death benefits because the insurance company took photos of her husband smoking, the apparent cause of his death. Abe just sits in the background but we know he is in tune with the fraudulent activity of the insurance company. Almost immediately he is assigned to a new case: an ex-con with a million dollar life insurance policy has apparently been found dead in a car crash burned beyond recognition. Abe drives to the tiny snowy desolate village where his questions of the townsfolk reveal that the victim was Kelvin Anderson, the brother of Isold (Julia Stiles) who is married to a low life type named Fred (Jeremy Renner), a man who we have seen in flashbacks as the one responsible for arranging the car crash and setting the car on fire. Abe sneaks around the town, spies on Isold, and becomes involved in the investigation in more ways than the honest one. It is the interplay of the three - Abe, Fred, and Isold - that provide the intrigue and mystery of the apparent framed insurance scam.The screenplay is so full of holes that it is difficult to follow the case's development. The actors are superb artists: Forest Whitaker made this film almost simultaneously with his Oscar winning 'The Last King of Scotland' yet here his character is plagued by an affected accent and by the lack of substance that might make us care about his plight; Julia Stiles does her best with the little she is given to do and Jeremy Renner is convincingly menacing without any factors that make us find him worth caring about. The supporting actors (Joanna Scanlan as a sleazy bartender, Iddo Goldberg and Philip Jackson as the police, Alfred Harmsworth as the 'son' of Isold, and Vladas Bagdonas as the coroner) actually fare better than the leads as far as material available.The strong aspect of the film is the visual imagery, due to the decisions of picture composition by Kormákur and cinematographer Óttar Guðnason and Mugison's musical is apropos for the mood. But the film remains grounded and a bit on the confusing side because of the director's lack of unity. One wonders why Whitaker, Stiles, and Renner signed on to this little film. Grady Harp