A Little Trip to Heaven

Product Description When a scam artist dies with a million-dollar life insurance policy, his sister and her husband try to collect... but an insurance investigator has very different plans. 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 Isolde (Julia Stiles), the dead man's sister, whose face is disfigured by severe scars, Holt slowly begins to lose his professional distance. Against the backdrop of a hostile, endless and harsh midwest winter, the characters reveal themselves to be multi-layered, involved in a curious yet balanced plot. In the end Holt must decide if doing the right thing is worth doing something very, very wrong. Amazon.com Moody dialogue, drab lighting, and characters who aren't quite who they say they are pepper the indie film A Little Trip To Heaven. Starring Forest Whitaker as Holt (an insurance investigator looking into a man's suspicious death), and Julia Stiles as Isolde (the frightened and sketchy sister of the deceased), A Little Trip's destination actually is closer to hell than heaven. Unevenly portrayed and not well-fleshed out, not one of the characters is sympathetic. Isolde's brute of a husband is the prime suspect, but Holt--who in a different film would be the story's hero--isn't exactly a saint either. There's a particularly creepy scene where he's little more than a peeping Tom, justifying his perversion as doing what's necessary to get his job done. As shown in films such as Half Nelson and Sherrybaby, imperfect characters can make for compelling filmmaking. The problem with A Little Trip To Heaven is that we want to root for someone--anyone--but there's just no one who's worthy of our interest. --Jae-Ha Kim