This Blu-ray from Lightyear will be available for purchase on February 17th.
A few out there believe that just about any movie from the 70s, 80s or later is easy to attain. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Many titles from just about every ago vanish, and for a variety of reasons. Rights issues, a lack of box office receipts during their original run or VHS release (so the studio isn’t interested in spending more on them), and other problems can all contribute to a feature going out-of-print and becoming extremely sought after.
Actress Diane Keaton (The Godfather, Annie Hal, Manhattan, Reds), passed away only a few months ago. In the 1980s, she decided to make the leap to director. According to her list of credits, in between movie roles she also made a short film. The picture was about her younger sister, who had started working as a legal secretary, with the filmmaker asking about her wants and aspirations for the rest of her life. It seems that the short led to Keaton moving on and tackling this documentary project.
Lightyear is now releasing a Blu-ray of the documentary Heaven. The movie deals specifically with opinions on the afterlife, with the director interviewing a group of individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds and asking them questions like whether they believe in “Heaven” and what it is, before pursuing even more specific information on the topic.
While Keaton later directed feature films like Unstrung Heroes and Hanging Up, this early effort is an interesting debut. She showed creative flair while attempting to delve into a complex subject and recording a lot of divergent opinions. The film cuts quickly between various individuals who are asked whether Heaven exists, what it is like, what happens there, and so on. Everyone gives their own curious interpretations, while the feature cuts away to moments from old features, not to mention footage of evangelists.
Despite the potentially serious subject matter, Keaton’s sense of humor shows. This is a zippy little movie that does nothing more than ask interesting questions to people who tell Keaton and the viewer what they believe, or hope, to see and experience. It’s all cut together in an amusing manner. One of the funnier queries is whether or not physical sex would exist in Heaven and if it would be different than what is experienced in the mortal world. Again, the interviewees have wildly different opinions, and one subject jokes about it, guessing that, “You make little dead people,” which might be the film’s most memorable offhanded comments. It’s clear through Keaton’s observations and cutting that no one sees Heaven in the same way, and some don’t believe it at all (an atheist and a priest are placed on a stage together and bicker amusingly).
The sets are quite odd and exaggerated, and some of the interviewees even appear in elaborate costumes. It seems many participants were pulled off the streets of Hollywood, Venice Beach and Los Angeles-area shopping malls. Keaton even manages to speak with famous boxing promoter Don King, who offers his take on good and evil, his own view on the afterlife, and why he thinks he deserves to go to Heaven.
While I’m not a religious person, this documentary is an interesting take on the subject, asking intriguing questions and engaging thoroughly over its relatively brief 80-minute running time. One does get the impression that everyone has their own, often very quirky ideas of what’s out there in the great beyond, and that it’s all good as long as it keeps us happy and empathetic members of society.
This movie hasn’t been available on Blu-ray, well, ever. Something that should be noted about this release is that there is no information about the source material and one imagines there wasn’t much to work with. It is obvious that there haven’t been any restoration efforts done and, frankly, the print is consistently speckled and grainy. I would guess that the many movie clips used in the picture might have been public domain or from a footage collection service and never looked particularly good to begin with (or that they could be cleaned up). And honestly, the interview footage isn’t much better. So, overall, the picture quality isn’t very impressive. This is more a case of a title that no one has seen in forty-plus years and hasn’t been available on any format finally getting a release in the hopes of being discovered by fans and those who do remember the project.
The disc comes with a trailer and no other bonuses. It’s unfortunate that Keaton really never had the chance to record a commentary for the film. However, she did promote the movie during its original release with appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and other talk shows, so it would have been nice to see some clips explaining her inspiration for the project. Or perhaps even the short film mentioned earlier and called What Does Dorrie Want? that she made previous to this title.
Heaven is an interesting documentary title that does offer insight into how people perceive the afterlife, as well as showing some of the artist’s personality behind the camera. This is a bare bones Blu-ray that doesn’t offer excellent picture quality and could do with a proper restoration, but it’s difficult to ascertain if that’s even possible. For now, it’s good enough to know that if you were ever curious about seeing this movie, you now have the opportunity to do so.
