Camoo
After watching this film last night for the umpteenth time I decided to finally write a piece up about Gates of Heaven, which has to be one of the greatest documentaries ever made, a film so full of joy and serendipity it appears to be creating itself as it goes along. On the surface we are watching the goings on behind a pet cemetery, the story of a family, the rivalry between prior and current owners of the cemetery and clients who wish to have their pets buried there. It should be noted that these people really really loved their pets, and we see interviews with pet owners who treat their animals like they are a part of their families. This love is what gives the film its real meaning; the more they speak about the love of their animals, the more they reveal about themselves: what it means to bury a pet and afford it an afterlife is a symbol for what we all hope for. Astonishing first work from Errol Morris, a master observer.
MartinHafer
If this had been the first Errol Morris documentary I'd seen, then perhaps I would have enjoyed it much more than I did. After having seen possibly his best film, MR. DEATH (a magnificent documentary by Morris), I think my expectations for GATES OF HEAVEN were higher than what it delivered.This film is a documentary about pet cemeteries--the people who own them, run them, patronize them or who are in affiliated industries. Like other Morris documentaries I've seen, there is no narration--the people just talk and talk and talk. While this can work very well, in this documentary it created a piece with little sense of direction or purpose. Sometimes, what you saw was pretty interesting or insightful and often it just seemed like pointless rambling. I really wish Morris had taken the more poignant moments and fleshed them out some more. In particular, the rather sad old lady towards the beginning who just ranted about how her son takes advantage of her and how she's all alone--this was VERY powerful and compelling but then the scene abruptly changed--leaving me feeling rather annoyed. Another interesting person was the guy at the rendering plant. While I agreed, in part, with him and his sensibilities, he sure came off as a bit of a jerk and I wanted this to be pursued as well.Overall, this is a very hit or miss film with many dull moments--peppered by some that are actually a bit intriguing. My advice is to try some of Morris' other documentaries--with experience, they certainly got better.UPDATE: Apparently, director Werner Herzog told Morris that he'd eat his shoe if GATES OF HEAVEN ever got released. And, since it did, Les Blank made a strange little documentary in which Herzog talks (A LOT) and eats his shoe. I saw it on Turner Classic Movies recently.
MisterWhiplash
They're not like us entirely, but they're just like us in an essential way: they want to have a good, solid profession (yes, it is as owners and workers at a pet cemetery), and they love(d) their pets. There's an essential part of the doc where a woman talks about the 'spirit' and how when a body dies the spirit must go elsewhere. Although the topic of if there is heaven or hell or any kind of afterlife can be debated till days end, a film like Gates of Heaven, Errol Morris' debut, gives the very clear notion that an animal does have a spirit, because the human being that cares for it has a level of love and compassion and just sheer avoidance of loneliness that a spirit must be present. Life becomes all the greater of importance when loss comes, as a cycle comes for those who have loved and lost, and it's just the same with animals as with people. You don't have to be an eccentric, like some may be (or may not be depending on your definition of eccentric), to know what life is, at the least when it's gone.There's not one person in Morris' bizarrely funny and expertly unobtrusive look at the lives and work of those involved with pet cemeteries who is without some kind of spirit, and in all their slightly strange (the guy who works at the meat processing plant), sort of mockable in the Christopher Guest sense (there's one guy, the ex-insurance agent son of the cemetery worker, who goes by the "Double As and Double Rs" as rules for life and has trophies on his desk when he had job applicants for encouragement), and cheerfully quaint (the old lady who complains about her son, and wishes she could drive) appearances on film, they're very much alive. It's not exactly a satire, though one might think it was an off-key one if it were a mockumentary. 'Gates' is layered in ways that many documentaries try to shy away from, and at the same time Morris has a definite knack for presenting the people objectively- or however much a documentary filmmaker, or any filmmaker, can present them 'as is' in their testimonials- while having a very subtle hand with subjectivity with the camera. It's obvious Morris didn't have much money to make the film (it took Herzog and eating his shoe to help get the film released), but there are little moments of invention, like the spinning newspaper to the headline, or the unflinching angles on the ex-plot-of-land for the dead pets which is now next to a highway, or just simple pans or having one man- the musician son of the Harberts family- listening to the music he's recorded.Morris has lots of things like that going on, but it's really all a series of stories and personal accounts of two sides of pet cemetery workers/owners: the completely heartfelt and crippled Floyd McClure, who due to not getting all the paperwork right, despite having all of the heart he could muster up, lost his pet cemetery and all the animals were dug up. Seeing this gentle man of conscience is one part of Morris's layering, as he's a sincere individual who truly loves the animals he worked to find resting places (and despises the equally passionate, crafty but laughable rendering plant owner), and with a fatal flaw at work that he trusted animals more than people. But then there's the mixed flip side of the Harberts family, who took the dead pets previously buried with McClure, where the patriarch is a consummate professional, his kids either have not much interest in the outside world except their own creativity (the musician), or have accepted their lot in life as a worker for the family (the ex-insurance salesman). These are the kinds of people that one would've not really seen on Six Feet Under, if only because in this case suggestion, from the interviews, says probably more than the deep character analysis of the show.And Morris deftly mixes these two stories with some people who've had their pets buried, or knew people who had their pets buried, at the cemeteries. The woman who says the part about the pet having a spirit is one, but there's also the woman who tries to get her little dog to sing, or the one who talks about the grief she had with the death of her dog, and at the end of her tips to help save one's dog the husband says "neutered." There are close-ups of the words on the grave-sites of the animals that ring this tragic-comic tone of the film ever so much, that there's enough in just having a memory left, of remembrances for these creatures that lived as short as two years and as long as sometimes twenty, for those who were closest to them. Gates of Heaven, while not quite Morris's best film (Fog of War and especially Thin Blue Line are higher up, though not by a lot) is a worthwhile 80 minute observation of the shaky but absolute reasons why that people need pets, and in effect just need each other period.
