Heaven’s Prisoners movie storyline. Ex-detective Dave Robicheaux has made a new life for himself and his wife Annie running a bait shop in the outskirts of New Orleans. When they save a little girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash, their lives become forever changed. They take the orphan child into their home and prepare to raise her.
However, a visit from DEA agent Dautrieve brings out the detective instincts in Robicheaux and he begins to ask about the rest of the passengers. This brings trouble to Robicheaux and he turns to drug lord Bubba Rocque, a childhood friend. But the friendship becomes estranged when an assault on the Robicheaux home leaves one victim…Annie.
Heaven’s Prisoners is a 1996 American crime drama thriller film directed by Phil Joanou and starring Alec Baldwin, Kelly Lynch, Mary Stuart Masterson, Teri Hatcher and Eric Roberts. It is based on a Dave Robicheaux homonymous novel by James Lee Burke. Harley Peyton and Scott Frank wrote the screenplay.
The film was followed by In the Electric Mist (2009), starring Tommy Lee Jones as Dave Robicheaux. In the sequel, Robicheaux still lives in Louisiana and has come out of retirement as an Iberia Parish sheriff’s detective.
Film Review for Heaven’s Prisoners
If Louisiana did not exist, Hollywood would need to invent it. In fact, Louisiana does exist, and Hollywood still needs to invent it. Consider “Heaven’s Prisoners,” such an overwrought and high-strung example of melodramatic excess that they should have scheduled rest breaks for the actors. The movie has plot enough for three films, although still not quite enough to make sense of this one.
I will attempt a concise plot summary: Retired rogue cop. Plane crash. Scuba air tanks run dry. Cute little Salvadoran orphan. Bait shop. Drug runner. Furniture stripper. Federal agent. Recovering alcoholic. Bad guy named Bubba Rocque (“One of those guys who was always eating light bulbs and pushing thumb tacks into his kneecaps”). Bar named Smilin’ Jack’s.
Rainy night massacre. Local Mafia don. Stripper who gets fingers broken, leaves for Key West. Bubba’s wife, nude on balcony. Shoot-out in the French Quarter. Fight on a streetcar. A beating on the bayou. An electrocution in a bathtub. Sex scenes. Revenge scenes. All of this and a scene where a character tastes the ring of moisture left by a cold drink, and identifies who must have been drinking it, even though gin cannot permeate glass and the moisture would have been, according to the best theories of condensation, pure water.
All the movie is really missing is a zydeco band and a mess of rice and beans. The former cop is Dave Robicheaux (Alec Baldwin), who retired from the force after a couple of guys got killed. Now he runs a bait shop and charter service with his wife (Kelly Lynch), the furniture stripper.
Bubba Rocque (I like the spelling of the last name) went to high school with Dave, which qualifies Dave to say, with fierce conviction, the immortal line “I know Bubba Rocque!” Bubba is the kind of guy who has a boxing ring set up on the lawn of his plantation, so he can go a couple of rounds before cocktails. Bubba’s wife (Teri Hatcher) meanwhile stands naked on the balcony, boldly challenging Dave to go where no man has gone before, except for every other man in the parish.
So venomous is the atmosphere of evil in this movie that it permeates everything, which is the only way to account for Mary Stuart Masterson (the shining light of “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “Benny & Joon”) as the stripper. To be sure, she has a heart of gold, but then strippers, on the average, are always just about the nicest people in the movies where they appear.
Everyone works very hard in this movie, and at a certain level it is possible to appreciate the simple craft and gusto that went into it. As Bubba, Eric Roberts is a splendid and complex villain, with his corn-rowed hair, his lazy drawl, and his wife as his cross to bear in life.
Alec Baldwin is cool, earnest and menacing as the hero, although I have seen him on the stage in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and feel he will agree this is not his best work. The photography by Harris Savides strikes a nice balance between the humid and the tumid, and Phil Joanou (“State of Grace,” “Final Analysis”) is tireless in his determination to get through four hours of material in two hours and 12 minutes flat.
But the material is so absurd that when the characters try to become believable, they only cast it in stark relief. Somehow a movie like this demands worse acting. It’s unsettling when the actors know the back-stories of their characters better than the audience knows the front-stories.
Heaven’s Prisoners (1996)
Directed by: Phil Joanou
Starring: Alec Baldwin, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kelly Lynch, Teri Hatcher, Eric Roberts, Samantha Lagpacan, Badja Djola, Joe Viterelli, Christopher Kriesa
Screenplay by: Harley Peyton, Scott Frank
Production Design by: John Stoddart
Cinematography by: Harris Savides
Film Editing by: William Steinkamp
Costume Design by: Aude Bronson-Howard
Set Decoration by: Dorree Cooper
Art Direction by: Monroe Kelly
Music by: George Fenton
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language, and for some nudity.
Distributed by: New Line Cinema
Release Date: May 17, 1996
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