Not Coming to a Theater Near You | 2005 in review
by Rumsey Taylor
The final moments of Gates of Heaven include a collection of silent, static shots that frame the headstones of buried pets, and ultimately the entrance to the cemetery they are contained in. Observing this is tantamount to staring in the face of God.
When described with the people and actions it contains, the film seems genuinely peculiar: half of it is devoted to the story of a failed pet cemetery in Los Altos, California, its financiers and patrons, and the issue of exhuming some four hundred graves once the establishment went bankrupt. The graves are relocated north to the more successful Bubbling Wells Pet Memorial Park in the Napa Valley. The latter is managed by the Harberts: a father who markets the “suggestion” that people will be reunited with their pets in some form and at some point in the future; an elder son, a former successful insurance salesman, who amasses his collection of trophies and plaques in an admitted effort to intimidate; and a younger son who lives in solitude on a hill overlooking the cemetery.
Such literal description does not befit the film. It requires some tolerance for it is austere and discreet in comparison to what are typically considered the features of nonfiction film. There are no captions to disclose location, and most of the character’s names are never revealed. The emphasis is solely on what is said, what is emoted.
And what is said often has nothing to do with the focus of the film. Ultimately, the story of two California pet cemeteries in the 1970s is less relevant than what the film is capable of revealing of the viewer’s threshold for love and hope. It is poignant, humorous, exploitative, and immeasurably transcendent.
Gates of Heaven hinges on a legendary monologue of an elderly woman, framed tightly in the doorway of her house. She begins speaking – uninterrupted, save for a car horn, for some few minutes – and her words relay no immediate connection to the preceding scenes whatsoever. It is something most any other filmmaker would have the discretion to edit out, but Errol Morris keeps it precisely for its apparent irrelevance, and her five minutes lend the film an additional stratum: she is a voice of death, of past accomplishment, of regret and loneliness.
Later we find that the woman lives adjacent to the first and ill-fated cemetery. Her inclusion in the film has no bearing other than to further disperse its aims. She is one of the film’s many beautiful, austere sequences, along with the image of the wheelchair-bound Floyd McClure, who organized the first cemetery, framed in front of an enormous willow tree; Phil Harberts, the older brother, seated in his office littered with plaques and trophies; and finally Danny Harberts, the younger brother, wailing on his electric guitar outside his house, with his amplifier pointed towards the cemetery gates in the valley below. The film is summated, perhaps, in the image of a tiny coffin perched on the lip of a golf cart outfitted to function as a miniature hearse.
At the film’s premier in Berkeley, Werner Herzog lauded the film’s purity (this was prior to his ingestion of one of his shoes; a gesture to endorse the film). Film is inherently an agent of manipulation, and its examples of purity – as in this, my favorite film – are rare.
Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida, and The Thin Blue Line debuted on DVD this year in an MGM boxed set.