Heaven's Gate

Despite my numerous misgivings, I believe there is a good movie to be chiseled out of the bloated, three hour and forty minute opus HEAVEN'S GATE, director Michael Cimino's notorious flop from 1980.  I haven't seen the alternate versions that were released in the wake of audience apathy, but most reports are not favorable.  As I watched this over scaled misfire, I was making note of what I would excise.  Sometimes, it wasn't entire scenes.  

And Cimino just lets them go on and on. A couple is shown dancing for five minutes.  The opening Harvard graduation and its subsequent party go on longer.  Funny, this method wasn't an issue during Cimino's THE DEER HUNTER....  Folks criticized David Lynch for showing a guy sweeping a floor for several minutes during the third season of Twin Peaks, but it fit that universe.  HEAVEN'S GATE is set in the late nineteenth century Wyoming during the Johnson County War, when the Wyoming Stock Growers Association went to war with cattle rustlers.  In Cimino's story, the rustlers are European immigrant settlers who are marked for death for being "thieves and anarchists."   Great pains were taken for period authenticity.  The director reportedly shot two hundred hours of footage.  It seems he barely parted with any of it.

I also have to cite a sequence in which Marshall Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) announces the names on the Association's hit list.  If he didn't read all one hundred and twenty five, it damned sure felt like it.  As the immigrants hear their names, the hysteria crescendoes. As of course it would, but Cimino allows the scene, one of many with what seem likes thousands of extras, to become some sort of grotesque comedy.  I'll bet the one or two people who saw this in the theater were laughing heartily.  

The only intended humor I could detect comes via Averill's college buddy Billy Irvine (John Hurt), who delivers a drunken graduation speech at the beginning and, in the middle of a grand scale, climatic battle, wishes aloud that he were in Paris.  That moment also becomes absurd.  I'm not entirely sure what Hurt's character really added to this tale.

Besides the business with The Association versus the dirt poor immigrants, HEAVEN'S GATE focuses on a love triangle with prostitute Ella (Isabelle Huppert) caught between Averill and Nate Champion (Christopher Walken), a hired gun for the wealthy Association members.  Some of their moments are engaging and moving; others are abrupt.  That's the film's repeated paradox - many scenes run too long, while others stop just when they're getting interesting.  Case in point - Averill's admission that he hates getting old to his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges), builder of the town roller rink, which is called "Heaven's Gate".  I would've liked to heard more from Averill at that late moment, but his character is the laconic type.

Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography has been praised by some and damned by others.  It is stunning in moments, the vistas (actually in Montana) breathtakingly captured.  But very often the lens is bespotted by smoke  and dust.  The final (and brutal) war scenes are positively choked in haze. 

Many of you probably know that HEAVEN'S GATE was the film that bankrupted a studio and more or less ended the era of "the director as auteur", or at least the one in which studios gave blank checks to them.  Coppola, Friedkin, even Spielberg were given carte blanche for their epics with quite diminished box office returns.  I normally could not care less about such things.  But here it is easy to see why. Cimino ran amok. Created what amounts to a filmed logistical nightmare.  Was he emulating David Lean?  This is an unnecessarily long, huge, and over scaled movie when a much smaller and quieter frontier tale would've been far more effective.  Especially for such a simple story.  But the themes, its clash between rich and poor, citizen and immigrant will certainly continue to resonate strongly.