A Little Trip to Heaven (Blueeyes Productions, Pink Productions, Palomar Pictures, Iceland Film Centre, First Look International, 2005)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 22) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing DVD of a 2005 Icelandic production called A Little Trip to Heaven. My first guess was that it was a romantic comedy about a family on vacation together; but I was quickly disabused of that by a note on the DVD, which read, “Insurance agent Abe Holt (Forest Whitaker) is investigating the suspicious death of the driver of a burned-out car. Holt has to work out whether the dead man, a con-man with a criminal record, could possibly have been the victim of an attempt to swindle the insurance company. When he meets Isold (Julia Stiles), the dead man’s sister, Holt slowly begins to lose his professional distance.” That blurb had me thinking “neo-noir,” if only because two of the classic mid-1940’s films noir, Double Indemnity (1943) and The Killers (1946), feature insurance agents among the dramatis personae (an insurance salesman who turns corrupt in Double Indemnity and a claims agent who’s personally honest but uncovers a criminal scheme in The Killers). It is and it isn’t; the plot elements are the stuff of film noir but the overall atmosphere is so gloomy and draggy I kept thinking, “If Ingmar Bergman had made a film noir, this is what it would have looked like.” It was made by an Icelandic director, Baltasar Kormákur, though he cast four American actors as his leads – Forest Whitaker, Julia Stiles, Jeremy Renner (three years before his breakthrough role in The Hurt Locker as the crazy leader of a bomb disposal unit in the U.S.-Iraq war), and Peter Coyote as Holt’s boss at the Quality Life Insurance company. It also takes place in the United States, specifically Hastings, Minnesota (though I briefly spotted a license plate which seemed to identify the locale as Missouri; there really is a Hastings, Minnesota, but “Hastings, Missouri” is a fictitious community in Marvel comic books), though it was shot entirely in Iceland except for some second-unit work in Canada.

Director Kormákur, who also co-wrote the script with Edward Martin Wineman and Sissi Kugler, kicks off the film (at least on the DVD version; the theatrical release had a different beginning) with Kelvin Anderson (Jeremy Renner) in a bar whose bartender, a buxom woman named Josie (Joanna Scanlan), is cruising him – as she later does with Holt and just about every other passably attractive man she meets, including the father-and-son team of cops that seem to be Hastings’ only official law-enforcement personnel. He couldn’t be less interested; what he’s most interested in is getting a fellow customer who’s identified on the imdb.com cast list only as “Long Haired Man” (Damon Younger), drunk. It’s part of an elaborate plan in which Anderson, an experienced con artist, will first siphon some of the gas out of the Long Haired Man’s car; then he’ll wait for the man’s car to run out of gas and stop, after which he will offer the man a ride to get gas, but will really crash the car deliberately, set it on fire, and walk away. Kelvin has cooked up this scheme in connection with his sister Isold (Julia Stiles) and her son Thor (Alfred Harmsworth), with whom he’s living in a remote farmhouse in Hastings and posing as her husband “Fred McBride.” For quite a while we’re not sure whether Isold is part of Kelvin’s schemes or an innocent dupe of his, but there’s a flashback sequence, repeated several times with more detail each time, in which Kelvin and Isold are shown driving a red convertible, deliberately cutting in front of a truck so the truck will crash into them, taking a flying leap off a cliff and both surviving. The idea is to make a false insurance claim, and to add realism to their claim Kelvin has Isold kneecap him to make it look like the accident injured him much worse than it actually did.

Abe Holt, played by Forest Whitaker just a year before his breakthrough role as an actor as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland (for which he won the Academy Award he should have won for his incandescent portrayal of jazz great Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s 1988 biopic Bird), is depicted as a super-dedicated servant of his company. In an early scene he’s sent out to investigate a bus accident in the fictitious “West City,” and he tricks potential scam artists by claiming (falsely) that there are secret cameras in the bus that will reveal anyone who got onto the bus after it crashed to make fraudulent insurance claims against the transit company. He shocks Isold on their first meeting when he comes to her house and sees her through the window while she’s wearing nothing but a filmy robe. When he knocks on her door, she frantically puts on something over it. For some reason Quality Life Insurance has issued a $1 million life insurance policy on Kelvin Anderson even though he’s a known criminal who’s just been released from prison, and Isold is named as his beneficiary. What Kelvin was doing at the bar was setting up a fake “death” for himself by which he would pick up an unknown man, go riding with him, crash the car, set it on fire and then claim that the corpse burned to a crisp was Kelvin Anderson’s instead of someone else’s. Then Isold will collect the $1 million payout and the two can split the money and get out of Hastings at last. Only Abe, whom we’d already seen deny a woman most of her late husband’s insurance claim because he’d got a preferential rate for not being a drinker or a smoker, and he had video of the man smoking, tells Isold that they’ve done blood tests on the corpse and found he was drunk at the time of his fatal accident. Isold is fooled at first and, much to Kelvin’s displeasure, accepts only a $1,500 payment for the damage to the car. Kelvin physically beats her when Isold gives him the $1,500, and later Kelvin takes Abe hostage in his car. Abe pulls a gun on him and Kelvin sensibly points out that if Abe shoots him while Kelvin is driving, the likeliest outcome is they both will die. Suddenly the car crashes and they both do die, but Isold is able to claim the $1 million death benefit for the nonexistent “Fred McBride” because Abe altered the insurance policy to name “McBride” rather than Kelvin as the insured. (Why he had to do that is something of a mystery, since the initial policy named Kelvin as the insured and Isold as the beneficiary, and Kelvin is unquestionably dead.)

The final scene shows Abe’s ghost entering heaven on a beach that had figured prominently in Quality Life Insurance’s commercials, which in this movie are literally omnipresent: every time we see a TV showing anything, it’s the same unctuous Quality Life Insurance commercial, with the same comforting message totally at odds with how the company actually does business. The film received mixed reviews; Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter wrote that director/co-writer Kormákur “falls short in the story department and even shorter in evoking the droll, twisted humor that must carry the day.” Dennis Harvey of Variety called the movie “"ESL Cinema,” with “its [murky] narrative … [undeveloped] characters, [dislocated] sense of place [and] fuzzy overall intent” that is “ill-compensated for by quirky touches” – though some of the “quirky touches” are among the best things about the film. They include the Big Brother-ish omnipresence of that Quality Life Insurance commercial, Josie’s insistence on cruising just about every male who walks in her bar, and a great gag scene in which, having discovered that “Fred McBride” doesn’t exist (he learned that when he came on the tombstone of McBride’s father, found it had the word “AND” under it, and excavated it to find that “Frederick McBride” was the other person memorialized under that stone), he shows up at the school “McBride” attended, tries to pass himself off as a relative, only is given away by the fact that “McBride” was white and Abe is Black. (The photo of “Frederick McBride” attached to his school record is in fact a childhood picture of Jeremy Renner.)

Charles compared it to the 1984 Repo Man, one of his all-time favorite films, especially since so much of the plot revolves around cars. He also said that Peter Coyote was basically playing the same sort of character Harry Dean Stanton played in Repo Man. Both of us basically liked the movie but with a lot of “yes, but”’s about it, though on balance I’d say that it’s one of those movies that doesn’t quite come off the way the filmmakers intended but is still a lot more stimulating than a lot of movies that do achieve what their makers wanted. The title comes from a song by Tom Waits, though it’s sung in the film by an Icelandic singer/songwriter named Mugison (true name: Örn Elías Guðmundsson) – a blessing as far as I’m concerned, since I love a lot of singers without conventionally attractive voices (Bob Dylan, Yoko Ono, Captain Beefheart, Randy Newman, Lou Reed) but I draw the line at the gin-soaked barroom growl of Tom Waits. It appears in the movie as a lullaby sung by Julia Stiles to her son (who’s referenced in a line of dialogue that she’s ashamed of what she did to conceive him, which could be merely an admission that he was conceived out of wedlock or a hint that Kelvin is his father and he’s a child of incest) and also over the closing credits in Mugison’s cover version. Mugison also contributes a number of songs to the soundtrack that obliquely reflect on the action in the manner popularized by Easy Rider (1969), though there’s also a version of Frank Loesser’s classic sexual ballad “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” It’s credited on the soundtrack to “Ann Margaret,” which surprised me not only because there’s clearly a male singer as well who’s audible but unidentified, but I would have think filmmakers who shared Ann-Margret’s Scandinavian ancestry (she was born in Sweden) would at least have spelled her name right!