All great documentaries are about more than what they seem and this absorbing first film from Errol Morris is about a hell of a lot more than the pet cemetery business.
It’s about how idealism needs a little pragmatism in order to work in the modern world. It’s about people who are burned out on that same modern world. It’s about our attachment to our pets and what that says about human nature. It’s about how we grieve. It’s about how a business school graduate and former insurance salesman might give up the big American Dream and then struggle to apply their skills to the job of cradling broken hearts.
To Morris’s vast credit, the film never spells out any of that. He lays the raw meat on the table and lets you make of it what you will. No narrator, no thesis statement, just a group of interview subjects all talking about things that they care deeply about. He certainly has no problem getting these people to yap. Most people who love their animals will talk all day about them (ask me about my cat for ten minutes of conversation and at least fifty cellphone pics).
And when people talk, stories emerge. Characters form. And Morris keeps unearthing treasure chests. This is a compact film (not even ninety minutes long), but it’s got enough material for a couple novels and a handful of Flannery O’Connor short stories.
The raw bones premise: A sincere animal lover with a little money and not much business sense starts up a pet cemetery in a beautiful stretch of land that sits at a stone’s throw from the Bay Area in California. It’s a reaction to his memories of growing up in the 1930s, 40s and 50s with the rendering plants, who collect dead animals in bulk for meat, fat, fur, teeth and whatever else they can get out of them for commercial re-purposing (the world’s first recycling business, so says the perfectly cocky rendering plant exec here, straight from his office desk chair). The drama starts when he can’t keep supporting the property and gets evicted, which means digging up those graves and moving them elsewhere. That place is The Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park in Napa, California. It’s a much better run business than the other, a family outfit run by a wizened patriarch and his two adult sons who are still struggling to find themselves and are neck-deep in their own personal problems.
And that’s it. The film ends before we know where all of these stories will go, but it’s all that we need for a searing portrait of the human condition. What happens when your dreams die? What happens when your beautiful little pet/best friend dies? How do you let go? How do you give back to the thing that you loved so much when it’s gone (whatever it is)? Can you ever? Maybe sadness is the natural state of humans. Unless you die at the same time as who or what you love most, all love leads to eventual pain.
You can’t escape it. It’s hard to find satisfying words to say about it.
Here’s a movie about it.