J Paul Johnson
Everyone knows Diane Keaton as an Academy Award-winning actress, especially for her breakout role in The Godfather films, her Oscar turn in the career-defining Annie Hall, and others as diverse as Reds, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Interiors, Shoot the Moon, Crimes of the Heart, Father of the Bride, Something’s Gotta Give, Book Club, and its 2023 sequel. Never content to be typecast, even as Woody Allen’s ditzy-but-whipsmart muse, Keaton brought a sly intelligence to almost every one of her nearly 60 film roles spanning six decades. She also produced a number of films. Her fans know her as a beloved animal rights activist, model/fashionista, and spokesperson, and they and her loved ones grieved her recent passing, at age 79, from pneumonia. Far fewer, though, know of Keaton’s directing work, which included a somewhat surprising and effervescently quirky 1987 documentary entitled, simply, Heaven—a film getting a timely remaster and re-release this week from Lightyear Productions and well worth a watch.
Raised as a Catholic and long preoccupied—even morbidly, she said—with the afterlife, Keaton took on the project to investigate what people truly thought about the great beyond. To do so, she interviewed dozens of subjects from a variety of walks of life and intercut their musings with clips from old films like Metropolis, Green Pastures, and Stairway to Heaven alongside popular songs that too explored the concept of heaven as saintly paradise. The result is as delightful and sometimes bewildering as the actor/icon herself, a mix of the heady and frothy, the silly and sublime, the religious and the secular.
Keaton described her own belief to Vanity Fair, at the time of making Heaven, as agnostic, and while her film gives her subjects the floor to speak for themselves, the director is similarly agnostic here on the subject itself. The interviewees (none of them named) range from a collection of fundamentalists, visionaries, and next-door types, including, among others, Keaton’s own parents and sister and one or two folks of minor, yet recognizable, celebrity—boxing promoter Don King, actor Victoria Sellers, and Swami Prem Amitabh. The interviews, like the entirety of the film in black and white, are staged and shot in an expressionistic, practically Caligari-esque small room with a single window (often, not always, featuring heavenly clouds rolling by) and harsh crosses of shadow intersecting their faces. It’s a disquieting approach that may seem to mock the subjects but also has the effect of putting each interviewee—whether a man of the cloth, a devout practitioner, or a pair of schoolboys—on equal footing.
Heaven is structured simply, organized by a set of Silent-Era-style title cards that pose the film’s key questions: “Does heaven exist?”, “How do you get to heaven?”, “What kind of rewards do you think heaven holds?”, “What does God look like?” and “Is there sex in heaven?” Among the dozens of interviewees there are few doubters; most are confident, if often curious, about what heaven will hold. There are also clips from a televised religion program featuring three stunningly-similar aged, white-haired, bespectacled white men debating a topic on which they all apparently completely concur.
One can see why reviewers largely dismissed Heaven upon its release, as it might seem dismissive or exploitative of its interviewees, but, as an agnostic myself, I found it not only cheeky but compelling, an engagingly watchable compendium of what the devout believe. On a side note, I wonder what such a project might look like in 2025 with the religious right largely having been taken over by MAGA-leaning white nationalists; even when Heaven‘s interviewees occasionally appear more fevered than merely fervent, they seem at least sincere.
Part of what gives Heaven its charm is its use of old film clips and popular songs, sometimes cut together in cheeky and unpredictable juxtapositions. Alongside sequences from Stairway to Heaven and Metropolis are Lionel Richie and Diana Ross crooning “Endless Love” and The Dream Academy’s “Heaven,” and, over the end credits, Sam Cooke’s “That’s Heaven to Me,” which pretty much perfectly encapsulates the film’s general thesis. (Sadly, The Cure would not release “Just Like Heaven” until six months after Heaven’s release; it would have fit the film’s vibe to the proverbial tee.) The film’s score is from Oscar-, Golden Globe-, and Grammy-winning composer Howard Shore; longtime Spike Lee and Coen Brothers collaborator Skip Lievsay is the sound designer.
Keaton said that she had loved the work of selecting and sorting out the clips and songs—“Maybe what I’d like to do in heaven is look at images forever and select them,” she told Vanity Fair—and these give Heaven its je ne sais quoi. It’s like nothing else I can name, but I can see in Heaven some Man Ray, some Errol Morris, some Les Blank, some Norman Rockwell or Grant Wood. It’s a curious pastiche of people and styles, but like Diane Keaton herself, it just simply works. Keaton in 2021 said the film may not have confirmed for her whether or not heaven existed but that hell did not: “Why would there be such a place as hell, for any of us?”
Whether or not Keaton has found herself looking down from heaven as she imagined, culling and collating images, who knows, but I hope that with Heaven‘s handsomely detailed HD remaster and timely re-release that at the very least more of the her fans can come to know this rare and integral work. As one of America’s truly iconic film stars, Diane Keaton will be rightly remembered most for her glamourous style, spicy wit, and ebullient personality in her onscreen roles. And yet her single documentary directorial effort, Heaven, constitutes an important, if left largely unpursued, facet of her art. Would that she had directed more; I’d gladly have lined up to watch.
