Fridae

A Little Bit of Heaven is shockingly retro, so retro you’d have to think back to Hollywood black and white era triple hanky weepies where virtuous females die from a terminal illness ever so slowly with dignity, but not before touching the lives of everyone around them... and snagging a romantic leading man as a bonus. That era is thankfully well behind us although the emotional drama did earn that genre its share of Oscars.

Director Nicole Kassell and her screenwriting partner Gren Wells have this idea that audiences are now ripe for a reintroduction of the old genre, remedying the saccharine overdose with a funny, sassy, liberated, explicit modern female lead. Why have an all-out weepie when you can cross it with a comedy centred on a bad girl? The theory here is some amount of sexually explicit situation comedy will do nicely to take the sting off the melodrama of seeing a character die very slowly on screen. Instead of having a virtuous do-gooder expire on film, why not have a very flawed and funny character drive her friends, family, and romantic interest up the wall sometimes?

Bringing to life a fine script are the film’s cast, notably Kate Hudson, an actress who normally cannot resist the lure of a bad romcom script. Having landed the protagonist’s role here, Goldie Hawn’s daughter puts in the best performance of her career so far. Whoopi Goldberg, Kathy Bates, and Peter Dinklage shine in their cameo appearances as God, the mother, and a dwarf social escort respectively, while Gael Garcia Bernal melts butter as the romantic interest.

As far as this concept goes, the results are surprisingly decent and effective as the film alternates between raunchy comedy, whimsical comedy, and all out melodrama. I half suspect that it makes the laughter more loud, and the tears more copious.