Gates of Heaven

“Gates of Heaven” was an interesting documentary, different from most documentaries that I’ve seen. I didn’t have any expectations or preconceptions of this film before hand and I think I’m still trying to work through my thoughts on the film.

The directors storytelling approach was unique I think. I didn’t quite understand what the story was that he was telling until about halfway through the film. Ultimately though I found it to be quite effective. He really let the audience do the thinking. I really had to work to figure out exactly what the filmmaker was thinking. And I think that for the subject that worked well. The film was about pet cemeteries, and it interviewed people who owned them, people who had pets in them, and someone who was completely opposite of them. So a lot of the film seemed to be about conflicting views and deciding which view was more accurate. In that sense I think his storytelling approach worked very well.

Something that I found to be ineffective, or maybe just overused, was the interview in general. The entire movie was pretty much just a bunch of talking heads. I really wanted some moments to breathe and understand what was going on in the film, but those moments were very sparse. But the few breathing moments that were in the film were very nice. There was a moment where we just sat watching a lady sing with her dog. It was a nice moment because we were able to learn a lot about her, her relationship with her dog, and her views on pet cemeteries just in those few observational minutes that we spent together.

One scene that I found to be particularly effective was an interview with an older lady sitting outside her trailer. It seemed to be one long shot of this interview that lasted about seven minutes. She was quite the character and I enjoyed spending that much time with her. I found it to be effective because I think it was able to get the filmmakers point across. He was showing us this lady, a human being, with quirks and faults just like the rest of us and we had the opportunity to either judge her or accept her. I think that might be one of the underlying meanings in the film.

I am still deciding whether the filmmaker was fair in his representation of each person. At first I thought he was completely fair because the film was compiled of a bunch of long interviews so I figured that he didn’t have a lot of room for manipulation. But then I thought about the shots that he decided to show and that made me think twice. A lot of times people would say extremely unintelligent things, such as “People like people because they like one another” and the fact that the filmmaker decided to put those unflattering things in makes me wonder how much I was being manipulated. But then I took a step back and looked at the bigger picture, the film in general, as apposed to specific parts, and I realized that we weren’t manipulated at all. I really feel that the filmmaker was honest in his representation of each character and situation. I think the film was a look at being human. We might not agree with these people but they are passionate and emotional about their pets and that is valid in itself, it does not need our approval for validation. We are all passionate about different things and the fact that they are important to us makes them worth something.