Gates of Heaven

I’ll gladly acknowledge this was a bold debut for Errol Morris, training a genuinely curious eye on a variety of unglamorous characters in the orbit of the pet cemetery industry. Its willingness to keep the camera rolling through their lengthy and often unfocused tangents makes the film more interesting than if it had stuck rigidly to the topic at hand, and Morris’s straight-ahead style exposes a certain layer of everyday human vulnerability not often explored. For all its admirably unorthodox attention span, however, it risks basking in banality, and it unfortunately spends too much time on that side of the fence, making its 83 minutes feel much longer.