Final Rating: 2.5/5
Diane Keaton passed away about a month ago. She was an Academy Award winner and received dozens of other awards for her talents in front of the camera. She starred in countless movies that cinephiles and casual movie-goers will remember and rewatch for decades to come. Nine years after she won Best Actress for her role in Annie Hall, she directed her first feature-length film, Heaven from 1987, a documentary pondering the afterlife.
In Heaven, Keaton poses numerous questions to her many interviewees. It contains expected avenues of inquiry like “What Is Heaven?” and “How Do You Get to Heaven?” It also contains unexpected avenues like “Is There Sex in Heaven?” and “Can Heaven Be Here on Earth?” In just eighty minutes, Keaton’s documentary covers a wide spectrum of angles and perspectives relating to the afterlife.
Her subjects answering these questions come with no expert credentials. After all, as one man puts it, they’ve never been to heaven. They can’t speak from personal experience. Nobody can. But many people in the world, and the majority whom Keaton interviews, believe that a heaven exists and hope to one day arrive there.
Like the questions, the answers range from innocuous to provocative. Depending on the beliefs a viewer brings to the film, some answers may come across as infantile and others as a resounding endorsement. The most fascinating element is the confidence that so many on screen have about something that is impossible to know.
Many of the answers–and the presentation as a whole–strike an amateur tone. The method in which they are juxtaposed against each other and the word art title pages that punctuate each new question give off a sense of grade school whimsy. The intercuts of brief clips from classic films depicting heaven or angels can seem sloppy at times.
Despite the unprofessional qualities, Keaton’s intentions are purely inquisitive. She wants to know what people think, whether you view heaven as a city with streets of gold where angels fly around or as an ageless metropolis millions of times larger than New York City. Every other answer stretches the mind in an unexpected direction, and it’s not always a pleasant one.
If this was just a quirky array of answers to potentially world-altering questions, it would be unremarkable as an artifact of film. But some of the answers are more than quirky. Some of the answers are terrifying: a man who says he looks forward to dying because of what he believes awaits him; a woman who believes everyone in heaven is white; a man who thinks that there’s no cost too high to ensure that someone makes it to heaven.
The appeal of heaven is easy to understand, regardless of what you think it looks like or if you believe it exists at all. Watching Heaven, perhaps the most concrete point that Keaton conveys is that the details don’t really matter. None of the answers to her questions have any basis in reality. What they really do is illuminate the nature of the humans saying them. This message becomes apparent long before the film ends. With stronger editing, there’s probably fifteen to twenty minutes of footage that wouldn’t be required.
Heaven is an interesting watch. It never pretends to be more than it is, which is an admirable trait, but what it is is fairly simplistic. It’s a shame Diane Keaton didn’t pursue her documentarian side a little further. Heaven has more personality than the two narrative films she directed later on: 1995’s Unstrung Heroes and 2000’s Hanging Up. Presumably, she’s now found definitive answers to all of her questions.
Thank you to Lightyear Entertainment and Foundry Communications for the screener.
