"Have You Had a Vision?"

Diane Keaton never got enough credit as a director, did she. The Oscar-winning actor – who died last fall – didn’t get behind the camera that often, and most of the time it was television work: A couple of Belinda Carlisle videos, an episode of China Beach or Twin Peaks, a CBS afterschool drama about schizophrenia starring Patricia Arquette.

There were two features, 1995’s Disney drama Unstrung Heroes – which was also about mental illness – and 2000’s Nora and Delia Ephron-scripted Hanging Up, which was not. But before almost all of that there was Heaven, an oddball 1987 documentary that sat a bunch of people down and asked them what happens when we die. Both earnest and mocking, and genuinely interested in both its subjects and their ideas, it is exactly the sort of idiosyncratic venture you would expect Diane Keaton to make. And now, almost forty years later, it stands as her most personal work.

Heaven is a pretty simple documentary, comparing and contrasting various visions of the afterlife. There are the confident beliefs expressed by the talking heads, a grab bag of quietly eccentric Americans, and these opinonations are supported or challenged through an eclectic selection of film clips. There’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Metropolis; there’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan and A Matter of Life and Death. Keaton also tosses in some nifty left-field references like Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon and the evangelical tract The Burning Hell.

The interviews, shot in an expressionistic set at canted angles by Frederick Elmes and producer Joe Kelly, are friendly and non-confrontational. People offer their thoughts and ideas to Keaton without apparently thinking about how they’ll come across to an audience, and it struck me that in the mid ’80s, people spoke to a stranger with a camera very differently than they do now. They’re excited to be part of this, to be sitting on a chair in an exotic studio and talking to Diane Keaton. Apparently Keaton’s team found most of them in California shopping malls, “casting” them like they were building a focus group. Some of them may still be a little starstruck.

I can see how this Middle American earnestness might read as naïveté forty years later, but she’s not talking down to bumpkins. Heaven emerging out of the same landscape as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet – which Elmes also shot, of course – and David Byrne’s True Stories, it makes immediate sense.

What makes less sense, of course, are the conflicting ideas of the afterlife, which are laid out in a way that feels more curious than mocking. The doc is organized by title cards, posing questions like “What Is God Like?” and “Are You Afraid to Die?” and rolling out the answers, such as they are. People are generally optimistic, which is nice for something shot in Ronald Reagan’s second term. Most people seem to think heaven will be pretty nice, though they’re in no hurry to get there. I can dig it.

The experience of watching this film in a theater in 1987 was one of bemusement, and maybe a little frustration: Diane Keaton makes her first movie, and this is what she wants to talk about? But now that we understand the scope of her career – the dramas, the comedies, all the projects that existed somewhere in between – Heaven feels much richer and compassionate than it did the first time around.

Keaton is puckishly exploring questions all of us have asked ourselves at some point: What’s next? Is this it? Am I ready? She’s not doing it in judgment or mockery, she’s genuinely interested in how people think about big, existential questions … and how we find ways to comfort ourselves when we can’t find the answers. This is a movie made by someone who spends a lot of time listening to people.

Lightyear Entertainment brought Heaven to Blu-ray last month, “newly remastered in HD with restored sound” – and having been old enough to see it on its original release, I can attest that this is probably as good a presentation of the movie as we’re likely to get. Heaven never looked especially dazzling.

I suspect that’s because it was produced with the expectation of television and home-video play, and finished on video. Elmes and Kelly’s stark, shadowy aesthetic was always a little fuzzy in the 35mm release prints, and a number of the clips have that distinct video look; between the film artifacts and video noise, I’d be willing to bet a 35mm print was the basis of this restoration, rather than an SD video source.

A 4K restoration might be able to eke out a little more detail, but the expense of producing that master seems prohibitive – especially for a small label like Lightyear. Maybe someone should reach out to Steven Spielberg (who’s thanked in the closing credits alongside Kathryn Grody, Deborah Harry, Carol Kane, John Lurie, Matthew and Carrie Modine and producer Frank Yablans) and see what might be possible. But until then, every time someone picks up this edition an angel gets its wings.

Heaven is now available on Blu-ray from Lightyear Entertainment … in a limited run of 1000 copies. If you have any trouble finding one, it looks like MVD still has some in stock.

Up next: Will the new Warner Archive collections arrive in time? Am I getting anything from Criterion this month? I’m flying blind, people, and you’re all coming with me.

And if you haven’t already, upgrade to the paid tier and catch up to Friday’s What’s Worth Watching, where I tackled a whole passel of genre stuff: Project Hail Mary, Ready or Not: Here I Come and 1000 Women in Horror. Try the 14-day free trial! It works!