MUBI

Pointlessly gigantic, but somewhat interesting, like a great edifice built out of tinfoil. Many scenes are just puffed up out of all proportion on their “significance.” A quiet dance in a empty hall between Kristofferson and Huppert lasts 4 minutes with the town band building to a climax, and this is after an equally long roller-skate dance number involving the whole town. The picture is also full of risible historical details like that: a grubby, hardscrabble Wyoming town where everyone has a pair of roller skates.

It has been 30 years since this movie was first released, flummoxing critics and audiences alike. There had never been a movie quite like this to come out of Hollywood, and at nearly 4 hours in length, more than an average American could bear in one sitting. Yet, if you accept the film on its own terms, you might just like it, as Kevin Thomas of the LA Times did. He was one of the few critics to praise the film at the time for its gorgeous cinematography and compelling characters that gave you a rare glimpse into the American West as it really might have been.

The story is culled from the 1892 Johnson County War that pitted newly arrived Eastern European immigrants against well established American ranchers, who didn’t take kindly to “sodbusters.” Building their homes from scratch on range land and refusing to budge when ranchers demanded they move on, this led to the ultimate confrontation between the syndicate ranchers and the new settlers.

The tale Cimino weaves is long and complex, and really should be seen over several parts, like Bondarchuk’s War and Peace or Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, rather than in one sitting. He shot over 200 hours of film with a 5 1/2 hour first cut that United Artists demanded be shaved down to a more suitable length. Cimino trimmed it down to 3 hours and 40 minutes for the first release, which included the Harvard prologue. However, after bombing in New York, he paired it down to two and a half hours for its LA premier, which many felt was an admission of failure.

To me the Harvard prologue is crucial as it gives the viewer a better understanding of the climactic final battle scene as John Hurt appears among the cattlemen. He and Kristofferson had graduated together, and gone separate paths, with Cimino choosing to tell Kristofferson’s story, as he had developed a soft spot for the Eastern European community, impeccably depicted in scenes that literally burst from the screen like the roller skating dance inside a half-finished barn.

You follow the immigrants and their struggle to build a community while callous cattle men decide their fate. In this sense it is an anti-Western, as it presents young America more in Marxist terms than in romanticized Western terms, with the immigrants fate sealed when the President calls in the cavalry to end the range wars.

The movie may have derailed Cimino, who would go on to make only a handful of films after it, but it lives on as a testimony to a director’s uncompromising vision and his determination to create a masterpiece despite the costs associated with it. Heaven’s Gate is well worth watching and should be judged on its own terms, as noted in Michael Epstein’s 2004 documentary, Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate, not those of film critics who had axes to grind.

This Film was first brought to my attention when I heard my father one night yelling at the T.V. in disgust the next day I found out that he had sat through this movie. His reaction which I could hear several rooms away and through much padding sparked my interest in seeing this film.

Now having actually viewed this film I wish to first apologize to Stanley Kubrick for saying that 2001: A Space Odyssey was the most over rated, convoluted, pretentious and all around worst films I’d ever seen. This film surpassed it by leaps and bounds, where space odyssey at least had interesting visuals this films had the look of some odd process of tanning and over exposure which makes it hard to ever really tell what’s happening, on screen. The editing is so loose that the story loses all it’s energy early on and never regains it. Then it becomes hard to understand because most of the dialogue gets drowned out by either the over zealous music score (which I found to be annoying at best and terrible at worst) or the sound design which sinks any chance of understanding what is happening. The Harvard scenes early on seem unnecessary as does the whole rollerskate sequence and in all there is nothing in this film to take interest in. In the end this film could have used alot of work cause as is this film manages to be a failure in almost every way possible. Please world let us bury this film forever so that westerns might get the treatment they deserve.

Time has since pointed to Heavens Gate as the beginning of the end of the American auteur explosion of the 70s. Ive always been reluctant to see this because Im an admirer of Cimino and didnt want to confirm the bad reputation heaped onto it. But I now fall in the camp that thinks this movie is actually damn near great. Deer Hunter and Heavens Gate both show a quality that Cimino had early on: great evocations of time and place. It was one of his greatest strengths and Heavens Gate dwarfs Deer Hunter – which I dont consider an easy task at all. A large part of that had to do with Zsigmonds eye and ranks among some of his absolute best work. And the music by Mansfield is a beautiful complement to the images. The content too deals with a subject Ive rarely seen in American cinema: whites as minorities. The fact that many whites emigrating to American soil were seen as undesirable foreigners is an aspect of U.S. history lost on many Americans today. People have forgotten that the concept of white majority is something that was only recently created. And my opinion is that Heavens Gate deals with that with exceptional clarity and a sure hand. That is not to say it is perfect by any means though. And the stories about what went on behind the scenes are insanity. But much like Matewan by Sayles, it is a uniquely American film that deserves another look.