Gates of Heaven [DVD]

If you are a fan of the unusual and find humor in oddities, you'll enjoy this film as much as I did. While it may seem slow-moving and at times a bit tedious, the fun is in the details. I tend to notice backgrounds, people's expressions, physical ticks or eccentricities or just plain off-the-wall stuff like bad fashion and even worse interiors. And this film is rife with them all.I think what the film attempts to do is expose the pet funeral industry for what it truly is: a necessary evil for those who aren't satisfied with what their vet would do with a pet's body once little Fi-Fi has passed. I looked up the cemetary in question and it's still in operation and looks even more lovely and finished than it was presented newly finished in the film.The main personalities are fascinating, especially the two sons of the owner, who could not be more different if they tried. One is from the corporate insurance sales world and one just blew in from the beach, the latter being the former's boss which makes for some humorous comparisons. And the Mom and Pop that own the place are a treat, especially juxtapositioned against the lovely California scenery. Other, uh, interesting folks fill in the spaces.An all-around entertaining and engrossing film which I enjoyed immensely.

This review is an excerpt from my book "Killer B's: The 237 Best Movies On Video You've (Probably) Never Seen," which is available as an ebook on Amazon. If you enjoy this review, there are 236 more like it in the book (plus a whole lot more). Check it out!GATES OF HEAVEN: It's two documentaries in one, and both are totally engrossing. On the surface, it's the story of two pet cemeteries, and a touching tale of peoples' love of their pets--a love that is often taken to extremes and sometimes carried overboard. Merely by presenting a sequence of pet headstones, for instance, Morris draws a fine line of quiet irony, forcing us to ask, Is this dignity or depravity?The Harberts family, as an example, owners of the Bubbling Wells Pet Memorial Park, north of San Francisco in Napa Valley's wine country, operate their own chapel and incorporated religion, the first tenant of which is that their Supreme Being is not "species-centric," and doesn't differentiate among living beings or limit his compassion just to humans. (I'm reminded of a news story I heard on the radio long before I ever saw this film: Land speculators in Japan were attempting to buy a Buddhist pet cemetery--which was, they believed, an almost criminal waste of real estate on that tiny island--in order to build a high-rise apartment on the site. But the Buddhist caretaker was determined to fight for the spiritual rights of his deceased charges, stating with perfect Zen wisdom that "Even a fishhead can become a god." As Pee-Wee Herman would say, "I love that story!")Watched more closely, however, we begin to glean that this apparently simple film is barely about pets at all, but uses pets as a metaphor--as an excuse to deliver a philosophical (and psychological) treatise on human relationships, familial relations, on business and pleasure, on hopes and fears, dreams and reality, change, grief, and--above all--love. The pivotal interview that ties the two topics together and illustrates this point is with an old woman who begins talking about her pets but inevitably ends up venomously denouncing her good-for-nothing, no-account, deadbeat, white trash grandson, who she raised from birth as if she was his own mother; who she'd loaned money to buy a car and who now never visits or drives her anywhere; who... but you'll get the picture.Once beyond the surface story of the pet cemetery, the film becomes a study of the three male members of the Harberts family. Despite their radically different personalities (daddy Cal is the tough patriarch; older son Phil is a Type-A "motivation expert"; younger son Danny a forlorn hippie who never made it with his music) all three exude the desperate stench of failure, and generally give the impression that each is grasping at any small straw of success, trying to make his own loopy view of life apply to successful business management. Beneath their thin demeanor of calm sincerity, the camera captures the subtle undercurrents of panic and despair. They know this is their last chance at the American Dream, and they know in their bones they'd better damn well take it seriously. They all look lonely, unloved and unhappy. They are obviously no ones' pets.With the apparent effortlessness of a seasoned storyteller and the misdirection of a master magician, Morris mesmerizes us and manipulates our emotions so insidiously that we're run through the full range of feelings before we even realize that we've been caught with our guard down. With just the subtlest of switches, the film can break us up with laughter one moment and break our hearts in the next. More than just another movie, "Gates of Heaven" is an emotional experience: It is humanly impossible not to be touched, amused and disturbed by this quirky, subversive, poignant, understated and overlooked little gem.

Just watched this as a video-on-demand rental. I found out about this movie from watching the Roger Ebert documentary "Life Itself," in which Ebert was said to have VERY heavily praised this movie. Figuring this to be some sort of relatively unknown, but heavily philosophical and meaningful, documentary, I HAD to check it out, of course. What I found was disappointing to me. It's not a bad movie, just nothing special, in my opinion. There are indeed some moments I'll probably remember, for being funny or philosophical. They are just some passing moments though. I like Roger Ebert, and I wouldn't call this a bad film, but, in my opinion, I would not call this anywhere near one of the top films I've ever seen, and I simply must have missed whatever Roger Ebert saw in the film.

Ostensibly a documentary (Errol Morris) chronicling the closing of an early pet cemetery and the establishment of another, and people’s views of that event, the film becomes a tuning-into many folks' philosophies of life. The jumping-off point for their stories is the death of their adored pets, and the history of their reciprocal loving relationships. And no sooner do they begin to tell their pet stories then, as is the case in much self-report and self-disclosure, stories veer off into human relationships and many other life events. The presenters seem to split into 2 factions, those who've lost their pets and those who've made a business of burying them. And there's considerable intensity and emotion in all, and Morris doesn't overly editorialize, though there definitely exists a dynamic of spirituality and compassion versus pragmatism and industry. He lets the viewer be informed, moved, often amused, and allows him/her to interpret and draw conclusions from the stories told. A timeless and very worthwhile classic.

This unusual documentary is more than the sum of its parts. Ostensively the story of a misguided attempt to set up a pet cemetery in (where else?) California, it offers an extended meditation on the relationship between animals and humans, and on attitudes to death and burial. Why should we not simply render our four-legged friends into fertilizer, as the beleagured manager of a rendering plant suggests? In short, because we love them, and that love is no less significant or sincere because it is sentimental and self-indulgent. The film proves that if you let 'ordinary' people talk to the camera for long enough they will say something profound: ' at the gates of heaven an all-compassionate God is not going to say, "Well, you're walking in on two legs, you can go in. You're walking on four legs, we can't take you"'. We may smile, but are pets really less worthy of post-mortem respect than humans? 'When I turn my back I don't know you, not truly, but I can turn my back on my little dog and I know that he's not going to jump on me or bite me. But human beings can't be that way'.

Une curiosité de l'histoire du cinéma. Pour spectateurs avertis.