'HEAVEN': DIANE KEATON’S QUIRKY LOOK AT THE AFTERLIFE

In 1987, the year she turned 41, Diane Keaton had roles to play in three films seen in American theaters. She was in front of the camera as the star of the hit romantic comedy “Baby Boom” and as a supporting player in Woody Allen’s ensemble comedy-drama “Radio Days.” But she went behind the camera for a strikingly original documentary presenting views about, and depictions of, life after death: “Heaven.”

To devotees of the Oscar-winning actress, who died in October at age 79, the first two movies are sure to be familiar, but the third is a far rarer commodity. Although Keaton later directed two mainstream features—1995’s “Unstrung Heroes” and 2000’s “Hanging Up”—“Heaven,” which had a fleeting theatrical run, was her lone credit as a documentarian.

Now this exploration of the possibilities of the afterlife has been given one of its own. Lightyear Entertainment has prepared a remastered version of the film being shown in venues throughout the country, including on Feb. 13 as part of Film at Lincoln Center’s series “Looking for Ms. Keaton,” and will be released on Blu-ray on Feb. 17.

“Heaven” is a lively, unpredictable work that relies on Keaton’s interviews with an impressively broad range of ordinary and extraordinary people, including sincere believers, unabashed oddballs, avowed atheists, members of Keaton’s family, and, memorably, boxing promoter Don King. Keaton neither narrates nor appears on camera, a bold choice that assured her film would be judged on its merits. Yet Keaton’s off-kilter taste—reflected elsewhere in her rambling dialogue delivery and outré fashion sense—is in evidence in her attraction to the strange personalities asked to ruminate on the hereafter. The tone is established by the film’s very first interviewee, who struggles to complete the sentence beginning “Heaven is” amid a flurry of pauses and false starts. Typical of Keaton’s inventive sound design, forest sounds, including birds chirping, are heard.

Yet the film delights in the all-too-human inability to articulate a firm vision of a place or concept as amorphous as heaven. Working with the talented editor Paul Barnes (whose credits would come to include Errol Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line”), Keaton structures the film into discrete sections. Ethereal title cards present large, infinitely ponderable questions such as “Do You Believe In Heaven?” and “Is There Love In Heaven?”

Sometimes Keaton presents a burst of short answers from her subjects—including, in reply to “Are You Afraid to Die?,” such quick-hit assertions as “There is no death,” “I will never die” and, repeatedly, the biblical reference “To die is gain”—before lingering on more thoughtful or at least more protracted answers. Intelligent skepticism (“It seemed something that people used to comfort themselves against the horrible, unthinkable reality of slowly growing old and losing capacity and rotting away to die”) is represented along with something resembling religious orthodoxy (“I do believe in the saints, and Mary his mother, and I do believe that God is man”). Others have ideas unmoored from any known belief system.

In photographing the interviewees, cinematographers Frederick Elmes and Joe Kelly favor odd angles and dramatic lighting uncharacteristic of traditional talking-head documentaries. Many are seen in extreme close-ups that accentuate not their oddness but their earnestness, as with one man who, discussing the possibility of love in heaven, seems stirred by the hope that he might yet experience love on earth. The subjects are seated on sets that are celestial-looking in their angular bareness, and nearly all are photographed with ghostly shadows cast across their faces.

Keaton augments the interviews with wittily chosen representations of the afterlife (and related themes) from various old movies, including “A Matter of Life and Death” and “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” She incorporates films as seemingly irrelevant but surprisingly apropos as the Bela Lugosi horror movie “The Black Cat” and an Astaire-Rogers musical. Some of the sillier visualizations of heaven seem chosen to prove that filmmakers, no less than regular people, struggle to conceive its particulars. Keaton also repurposes religious instructional films and audio excerpts from fire-and-brimstone preachers, including one who makes this ominous promise about heaven: “Gone will be the Chevy Chases and the Erik Estradas and the weirdos of Hollywood.”

Keaton resists assuming a condescending tone. One senses her tolerant intrigue at the straight-faced, conspiracy-tinged assertion of a woman who claims that Christ has returned and is living in a Pakistani community in London, and one imagines she was moved by the couple, both uniform-wearing members of the Salvation Army, who speak not of “passing away” but of being “promoted to glory.” Her camera lingers on a woman whose “answer” to the question “What Is God Like?” is to sing the Lord’s Prayer, and on another who tells through tears of the many ways God has helped her. Keaton’s longtime pal Mr. Allen would surely be amused by the woman who says she imagines God to be like Groucho Marx.

In a 1987 Rolling Stone interview, Keaton did not present herself as a believer in heaven. “I think it’s just a dream, just a longing, something you want but you don’t know what it is,” she said. Yet “Heaven” ends up making a case for its subject by the sheer number of people who have given intense, if not always serious, thought to its existence. The argument may not be as strong as the best apologetics, but it makes for an endlessly engaging, one-of-a-kind film.

Mr. Tonguette writes about film for the Journal.

2026-02-07T12:05:31Z