MOVIE REVIEW : KEATON’S ‘HEAVEN’: HOLLYWOOD ICONS AND LOST ANGELS

Heaven is different things to different people, but it’s pretty well agreed that it is ongoing and everlasting. These qualities, at least, are shared by Diane Keaton’s “Heaven,” a quirky, exceedingly personal 80-minute “documentary” about the hereafter that feels as though it too may never end. (It’s at Cineplex, Beverly Center.)

Keaton’s working method has been to corral all manner of Angelenos, from fundamentalist churchgoers to regulars of Venice Beach and Hollywood Boulevard, right on the Nathanael West borderline between the bizarre and the pathetic. She has had them photographed against oddly shaped and marvelous sets, asked them such questions as “Are you afraid to die?” or “Is there sex in heaven?” and intercut their answers with painstakingly culled archival footage.

In that footage, if you look fast, you’ll see the tortured face of Dreyer’s great icon, Falconetti; Spencer Tracy scuffing up clouds in “A Guy Named Joe”; bits from “Stairway to Heaven”; more from “The Green Pastures” and, of course, “The Horn Blows at Midnight.” And reels more.

The film that results from all this frantic manipulation begins on a high of good will and admiration for its impeccable techniques. There are great matte shots of faces from ‘40s and ‘50s ads, which appear like stars seen through a night window; a planet rushes toward us, even more magically than Dorothy’s vision of the twister in “The Wizard of Oz”; there is pearly-seductive lighting, Post-Modernism at its most luscious.

But by the time we look at old promotional films for religious groups--and particularly at one, where a beaming macrocephalic, 32 inches tall and 54 years old, is brought out on her little crutches to sing rapturously about her faith--Keaton’s choices begin to seem conscienceless and remarkably un-Christian.

You get a strong feeling that Keaton filled her “cast” like a living treasure hunt in which the deranged and the psychotic got the top spots; where outlandish clothing was a real plus, and where there were no points at all for aptness of thought.

A few of Keaton’s subjects have had firsthand knowledge of emanations from the Great Over There: an astral visitor in the living room; a revealing out-of-the-body experience; a knack of speaking in tongues.

Some, like the robed and bearded young man who sees cows as God’s lawn mowers, are heavenly debaters; others are sardonic, fire-and-brimstone know-it-alls. One small boy is sure that there’s sex after death, but puzzled at the probable results: “What happens? You make little dead people?”

Many of her subjects are older, including the birdlike and touching Grace and Keaton’s own sprightly grandmother, Grammy Hall, who was 93 when the film was made and has died since its completion. (Grammy Hall’s answer to whether heaven exists was a resounding negative.) It’s odd, then, that so few really touching moments emerge from their interviews, and that Keaton offsets the few that do with wry or goofy clips--as though anything humane might smack of sentimentality.

Her use of immortal film scenes as padding for a tepid series of interviews, isn’t exactly felicitous. Falconetti’s face has its own inviolable resonance--to intercut it so that she seems to be looking worriedly at a clock, ticking off the time left on Earth, is a shabby trick. Cocteau’s Beauty and her Beast ascend to the heavens in an indelible moment from a seemingly effortless film, made under conditions of the greatest privation and hardship. To see it plundered offhandedly like this seems almost indecent.

Before “Heaven,” her first feature-length film, Keaton had two works published: “Reservations,” photographs she’d taken of empty hotel lobbies, and “Still Life,” a compilation of kitschy publicity stills from movies of the 1950s, selected with a highly ironic eye. The tone of “Heaven” is substantially the same: stylistically impeccable, self-consciously precious and faintly smug.

Keaton has surrounded herself with the cream of movie makers--cinematographers Frederick Elmes (“Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet” and more) and Joe Kelly; art director Barbara Ling (“True Stories”), editor Paul Barnes. But the elegant frame they have created only serves to point up the vapidity of the material inside.

‘HEAVEN’

An Island Pictures release of a Perpetual production for RVP Productions. Producer Joe Kelly. Executive producers Tom Kuhn, Charles Mitchell, Arlyne Rothberg. Director Diane Keaton. Camera Frederick Elmes, Joe Kelly. Editor Paul Barnes. Music Howard Shore. Art direction Barbara Ling. Sound Peter F. Chaikin, John E. Kaufer, Tom Moore.

Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned to give special guidance for attendance of children under 13).