I initially watched Gates of Heaven, or at least about half of it, over a year ago. At the time, I judged the parts I had seen to be the worst movie I had the misfortune to watch in a while. I posted a review in which I stated up front that I didn't finish it, but that I didn't think I was missing anything because of the poor quality of that first half. I even said that I felt my time would be better spent digging a hole than watching this film. Wow. That was harsh. It must have been in my Angry Young Reviewer phase. I got a lot of emails from readers who stated that I was somehow honor-bound to endure bad movies to the final fade, a point with which I did not agree (obviously, or I wouldn't have posted a review). I felt bad, though, and figured that someday I would watch it again. I happily admit here, to the entire world (or those three or four people reading my reviews), that I was wrong about it.

Now, Roger Ebert placed it on his Top Ten Movies of All Time list, right alongside such classics as The Third Man, Citizen Kane, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don't agree with him at all, but I believe that there is more to it than I initially gave it credit for. My initial complaint, and a complaint that I still harbor, is that the film is visually flat and boring, consisting as it does of extended close-ups of people talking, followed by more close-ups of people talking, etc. This is tough going, especially early in the film. By the end, I found that I had gotten used to it, but I wouldn't say that it was ever visually interesting outside a couple of shots near the end that really hit you in the stomach.

Errol Morris, one of our most gifted documentarians, made this as his first film. After reading a newspaper article about a California pet cemetery closing and transferring the contents of its graves to another pet cemetery, he set out with his camera and cinematographer Ned Burgess to interview those involved. It is clear from the film that he didn't have much of an idea of what he was going to get at first; most likely, he just thought the concept of pet cemeteries and mass dislocations of buried animals odd and interesting. And it is.

The first half of the film really looks like a freak show, a big in-joke where the smart audiences can laugh at the bumpkins onscreen. Slowly, over the course of the film, which is about so much more than pet cemeteries, Morris revisits a lot of the images we chuckled at, and I couldn't laugh. There were a few silent montages of images of headstones and pictures of happy pets that made me tear up. We first meet Floyd, a rambling, sometimes incoherent man who owned the original cemetery. We learn about his devotion to animals and his opposition to the rendering industry, against which he rails passionately. His arguments are met by a somewhat smug representative of the industry, who preaches conservation and progress to an audience that just wants their pets treated well. Floyd's story and the story of his investors who lost their shirts when he was forced to close the cemetery is a picture of innocent and guileless love for animals; a virulent anti-business strain runs through these scenes.

We later meet the Harberts family, who own the new cemetery and are all business. The youngest son got his degree in business but moved home to live in a cabin, bury animals, and play his guitar. The oldest son sold insurance before returning home to apply his gung-ho, rah-rah business sense to the family business; now he has to deal with memorizing routes to vet offices, and he's not as sure of himself. There is an extraordinary scene in which the Harberts patriarch tells the owners of a mixed-breed dog that mutts make the best pets, but we can easily imaging him giving a similar speech to the owners of a purebreed. Even the names of the cemeteries are telling: Floyd owned the Foothills Pet Cemetery, down-to-earth and unpretentious; while the Harberts run Bubbling Brook, a name that elicits a very long and somewhat cynical explanation from the Herberts matriarch.

In between the gritty realities of plot sizes and treatment of dead companions is a heck of a lot of musing on the meaning of life, the question of what qualifies an organism for entry to heaven, the duties of children to their parents, the role of the birth control pill in the expansion of pet ownership (no, I'm not making it up), and the dynamics of married couples, among others. What comes out is the basic reason why people own pets in the first place, and why they are so special to us. Floyd puts it best when he says that he can't turn his back on a human because he can't know them, "not truly," but he can turn his back on his dog without fear. Maybe we have pets because they are the embodiment of some ideal companionship that you can never really get from a human who is capable of selfishness. Just the fact that I'm thinking about such things now is a good statement in favor of the movie. Through it all, though, is an uncomfortable feeling that Morris is laughing at his subjects, although I don't have any idea how he could have avoided it. Perhaps he meant to juxtapose our amusement with the humans involved in the business alongside our knee-jerk sympathy for the animals.