1980 / 219 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale J. Nauertz

If you’re wondering how the experimental, edgy films of the Seventies could give way to the commercial, adolescent-friendly, cuddly films of the Eighties, you really need look no further than “Heaven’s Gate”. “Heaven’s Gate” is the film that took independent-minded, edgy, adult cinematic fare to its ultimate, expensive conclusion. If that sounds like a good thing, well, it is…kinda.

First of all, some background. After doing some script work on the second Dirty Harry movie, “Magnum Force”, Michael Cimino had put his foot in Hollywood’s door. He used this opportunity to make another movie with Clint Eastwood, entitled “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot”. “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” is a quirky, funny, surprisingly dark little crime caper film about a group of criminals reuniting and putting their squabbles aside to…er, rob something. I can’t exactly remember what it’s about, only that it paired Clint with a very young Jeff Bridges and that, at one point, a couple of humping teenagers are tied together on a bed. Also, I think George Kennedy and a drive-in movie theater were involved. At any rate, the movie must have been moderately successful because it enabled Cimino to direct “The Deer Hunter”. “The Deer Hunter” is not an excellent movie, but it cleaned house at the Oscars and established Cimino as a director on the rise, a talent to watch, a man who would lead Hollywood to some kind of Golden Age. At least, that’s how they must have envisioned him, because after “The Deer Hunter”, United Artists backed a dumptruck full of money up to his house and told him to make whatever movie entered his damned fool head.

If Cimino had taken that money and used it to make a film involving time travel, space exploration and monsters, he might very well be working today. But Michael Cimino, admirably, had more noble aspirations in mind. He took the then-astronomical sum of $40 million dollars (which today would fund a cat food commercial) and made a movie about the 1890 Johnson County war in Wyoming. For those of you who know history as well as I do, the Johnson County war involved a bunch of robber barons reclaiming a large section of land from immigrants who were struggling to make a living. They paid a group of fifty hired guns 5 dollars a day and 50 dollars per killed immigrant to dispatch a “death list” of 125 settlers they deemed “thieves and anarchists”. Cimino chose to use money from rich executives to make a movie about the gulf between the rich and the poor, in which the rich won and the poor were largely slaughtered. It’s a cinch to see why he didn’t become the next Steven Spielberg. It’s also abundantly clear that Michael Cimino had what Dabney Coleman might refer to as “balls as big as church bells”.

It’s always best, when telling an epic tale of this sort, to boil it down to a few main characters that the average audience can relate to. In Cimino’s case, he told the depressing story of the Johnson County War from the perspectives of a Harvard graduate sheriff (Kris Kristoffersen), a moderately successful bordello madam (Isabelle Huppert), a hired killer (Christopher Walken, who is introduced in a manner not unlike Henry Fonda in “Once Upon a Time in the West”) and Jeff Bridges who plays…a bartender or something. (Bridges begins with a thick, immigrant accent and then immediately loses it in favor of a general Jeff Bridges accent. Though he seems to be the leader of the immigrant forces, at least until the strange, third act emergence of Brad Dourif who I assume is meant to be some manner of immigrant messiah.) One of these characters ends up becoming something of a bastard, though it’s not the character you might think. There is a sketchy love triangle between three of these characters, a cock fight orchestrated by another, and a roller skating hoe down involving three of the four. No, you didn’t misread that. I actually typed the words “roller-skating hoe down”.

“Heaven’s Gate” has a bad rep but, quite frankly, it’s a lot better than a lot of movies that are held in much higher esteem from the same time period (especially “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” which covers a lot of the same ground to less effect and, ugh, “Barry Lyndon” which is similarly set in a historical time period, boasts similarly realistic production design, and also has a less than likable protagonist). It’s the best of the notorious Hollywood flops (which puts it ahead of “Howard the Duck”, “Waterworld” and the quirky and likable “Hudson Hawk”…I have not seen “Ishtar”) though that really isn’t saying much. A lot of movies are better than “Howard the Duck”, “Waterworld” and “Hudson Hawk” (though “Hudson Hawk” is far more entertaining than it has any right to be). For one thing, “Heaven’s Gate” distances itself from those other flops by being rapturously gorgeous. The cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond is impeccable. Once you’ve seen “Heaven’s Gate” certain images from it will be burned into your brain for the rest of your natural life. It is handsomely mounted as well. The sets and production design are spectacular and yet filthy and realistic. I’d be hard pressed to think of another movie that so immerses the viewer in the realistic illusion of the Old West. And this version of the Old West is only slightly romanticized. There are no gallant heroes here, simply morally ambiguous men trying to achieve their own agendas. Some of them step up and do the right thing, some of them don’t. Some of them die defending their ideals. Some of them trade their ideals in for a couple of extra bucks. All of them are fairly fascinating characters. Also, unlike most of the notorious turkeys I mentioned earlier, you can see every dollar of the film’s monumental budget right there on the screen. The town of Casper, Wyoming and the settlements surrounding it give a perfect illusion of time, place and living conditions. It is sincerely stunning to behold. The musical score by David Mansfield is likewise beautiful; it is by turns stirring, uplifting, haunting and heartbreaking, just like the movie itself. Kristoffersen and Jeff Bridges are fine, but I must single out the magnificent work of John Hurt as an idealist who deals with the soul-crushing nature of the world by becoming a raging alcoholic and Christopher Walken whose performance is multi-faceted and indescribably awesome. While watching Walken here, it was sad to reflect on the hammy self parody he has lately become. Aside from his excellent turn in “Catch Me if You Can”, his recent performances have been been the same weirdo goofball schtick repeated ad nauseum. Sure, it’s entertaining, but compared to his work as a sadistic tap dancing pimp in “Pennies From Heaven” and as the surprisingly soulful hit man here, it makes me want to cry.

As much as I would love to hail “Heaven’s Gate” as an unfairly maligned masterpiece, however, I just can’t quite do so. Though the acting and production aspects of the film are uniformly excellent, the film is deeply, deeply flawed. The biggest culprit here is the film’s pacing. Three editors worked on this film and yet the movie still lumbers like a slowly dying elephant at times, nearly collapsing under its three and a half hour length. I love an epic film as much as the next man, but three and a half hours is excessive for almost any film that doesn’t have “Lawrence of Arabia” or “The Seven Samurai” in its title. (A possible exception to this provision would be the director’s cuts of the “Lord of the Rings” movies, which are almost as long as reading the books themselves, but grand and entertaining enough to justify their ass-punishing lengths.) But don’t fret, gentle readers, you can enjoy this epic festival of immigrant killing without suffering through the more bloated moments of its running time. The film begins, inexplicably, at a Harvard commencement ceremony in 1870. Twenty minutes are wasted here and the only information we gain from these twenty minutes of screen time is that Kris Kristoffersen is an idealist and friend to drunken, intellectual goofball John Hurt. This section involves a lot of long-winded speeches and dancing and could easily be summed up with one line of dialogue when the two reunite twenty years or fifteen screen minutes later. If you are watching this movie on DVD, you can watch the impressive opening shot and then easily skip this section without losing anything. Trust me. Then comes Kristoffersen’s arrival in Casper, Wyoming. Watch the first few minutes of this, simply for a beautiful, majestic shot of a train pulling through some gorgeous scenery and arriving in a wealth of gorgeous production design. Then, however, you can skip ahead to the moment where Walken shoots an immigrant with a large gun, bypassing a lot of murky dialogue that allegedly establishes the situations of the film but actually should have been looped due its nearly completely indecipherable nature. (You’d think forty mil could buy some better microphones.) After that there are still some slow patches, but they are tempered with great performances and scenery and photography so gorgeous that they would make Terrence Malick weep and piss himself. If the movie has any faults, aside from occasional bloat and muffled audio, it’s these: it’s almost too ambiguous (for example Kristoffersen is apparently the sheriff in this county, something that wasn’t clear to me until near the end; that’s a a little factoid that could have been explained at least as clearly as the unimportant fact that he attended Harvard) and depressing for its own good and it spends too much screen time with Kristoffersen and not enough with Walken. The final battle sequence is more exciting and suspenseful than anything in the movie “300″ (non-stop battles seem good in theory but are really quite boring in actual practice) and the overall exploration of this country’s class warfare and cultural divide is quite mesmerizing. If this movie has a moral, it’s that the Rich have always exploited the Poor and it’s almost always been open season on immigrants. Perhaps they should change the motto from “Give us your poor, huddled masses” to “Just turn around and go home, you’ll be saving us all a lot of trouble”. The movie is like the flip side of “Far and Away”’s cheery, “make all your dreams come true in America” philosophy.

Seriously, this movie has some excellent, excellent moments but it’s dark moments are nearly excruciating in their downbeat intensity. It’s not all misery and despair, but the moments of misery and despair are just unrelentingly bleak. This, incidentally, isn’t a bad thing. A lot of movies could use to make their intense sequences more intense…it’s just that it doesn’t make for the crowd-pleasing entertainment that United Artists clearly signed on for. Cimino has always excelled at this. It’s the reason that “The Deer Hunter” works at all. But it’s pretty clear that Michael Cimino wasn’t going to survive the transition from 70’s intelligent fare into 80’s crowd-pleasing. If Cimino had directed “Empire Strikes Back”, for instance, it would have ended with Han being shot in the head, Leia being gang-raped and committing suicide and Luke selling out to the Dark Side. “The Return of the Jedi” would then have been two hours of Luke commanding the Empire and sitting in a dark room quietly reflecting on the death of his morals between blowing up innocent planets. Cimino was a great filmmaker, and definitely ahead of his time, but I can definitely see why his career didn’t really go anywhere. You can make movies like this, you just can’t expect them to make a ton of money.

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