Here’s yet another great, thoughtful review from Dan Schneider. The first of two parts.
DVD Review Of Gates Of Heaven
Copyright © by Dan Schneider
Roger Ebert is perhaps the most famous film critic in America. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his writing. It should be noted, however, that that award was for the writing, not his analytical skills. What separates Ebert from most published critics is that he is better with words than most. A dozen or more of his reviews are classics whose words stick with me to this day, such as his review of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which ends this way:
‘Taxi Driver’ is a hell, from the opening shot of a cab emerging from stygian clouds of steam to the climactic killing scene in which the camera finally looks straight down. Scorsese wanted to look away from Travis’s rejection; we almost want to look away from his life. But he’s there, all right, and he’s suffering.
This is a terrific piece of writing. Yet, Ebert is notoriously dense. He thinks that Steven Spielberg is a great filmmaker, and has panned many great films while praising schlock from the above mentioned hack, as well as the Star Wars films, and many other Hollywood junk fare, even as he recognizes, say, both the greatness and cultural relevance of the Up Series of Michael Apted. In short, his long time partner, Gene Siskel, who never quite had Ebert’s way with words, nonetheless understood the art of film far more deeply, and, while not a better writer, was certainly a better critic.
This fatal shortcoming is nowhere more evident than in Ebert’s infamous DVD blurb about Errol Morris’s 1978 documentary about pet cemeteries, Gates Of Heaven (not to be confused with Michael Cimino’s monumental Western film flop Heaven’s Gate), which declares this film one of the top ten films of all time. Not one of the top ten documentaries of all time, but films! Hell, it’s not even close to being as good a film nor documentary as Morris’s later The Thin Blue Line nor The Fog Of War. Perhaps this was just a young critic trying to make his mark. But, the evidence for Ebert’s making outrageously dumb proclamation is long. One might argue this is a solid to good documentary, and that it even is an important one, for its portrait of weirdos unleashed a flood of documentaries, in the near three decades since, about losers, wackos, and society’s castoffs, as if there was some great significance to cultural failure.
That said, the film has a perverse quality, as if watching someone slowly die, and trying to empathize with it. In that sense, the two films that most closely mirror it are fictive films- Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small and Tod Browning’s Freaks. One might also put it in league with the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest were it not played, or shot, straight. In fact, this is the film that Werner Herzog ate his shoe over. Morris had no money to finance the film and Herzog told him to do it anyway, and promised Morris that if he made a film, Herzog eat a shoe at the premiere, ala Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush. The act was subsequently made into the short subject film, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
The film’s premise is that there are people who will pay thousands of dollars to bury their pets like humans. Ok, I’m a pet lover- a cat lover, but I’ve never done so. I’ve never viscerally understood why we bury humans. A corpse is a corpse is a corpse. As long as it is disposed of cleanly, who cares? Yet the film starts off with a disabled old man, Floyd McClure, who tried to start a pet cemetery south of San Francisco, the Foothill Pet Cemetery in Los Altos, because he was haunted by the memories and smells of an animal rendering plant he visited as a youth, as well as the death of his collie as a boy, when it was run over by a car. Manifestly lacking any business sense, the man soon lost his business- as well as did several other investors (one schlemiel lost thirty grand in 1970s cash!), and the animals- four hundred and fifty pets, had to be exhumed and moved to another better pet cemetery, the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park, in Napa Valley- which has designer plots, run by a family of even weirder folk, if possible.
The founder, Cal Harberts- who bizarrely and without elaboration attributes the ‘explosion’ in pet ownership in the 1960s and 1970s to the dawning of the birth control pill, claims he wants his cemetery to be the best in the world, bar none, and he’s goddamned serious! He has two sons: Phillip is the older one, and is a control freak, who wears one of those ugly multi-colored shirts from the 1970s. He’s a former insurance salesman from Salt Lake City who feigns depth but is really an idiot, in the psychobabble vein- with mantras like ‘Mind over matter,’ who fears memorizing the routes to local animal clinic, to pick up corpses, wrongly. Then there’s his younger brother Danny- who’s also an idiot, but a more likable one, with a thin mustache and a bad love life, who is the heir apparent in the business, much to his older brother’s chagrin. He’s a stoner, and hard rock junky who gets off on playing his guitar- badly, across the canyon so he can hear it echo.
Part II of this review will appear tomorrow.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.