Opiniões dos críticos

In laying out the triangular relationship between Walken, Kris Kristofferson, and Isabelle Huppert, Cimino follows an impulse to draw every scene out into a "moment," then drizzling the results with David Mansfield's treacly soundtrack. The aim appears to be American Visconti, but the result is an abiding monotony that is something like being force-fed lyricism as a goose is prepared for foie gras.

Cimino made a film that's both conventional and boldly original—a Western that entirely fits the norms and expectations of the genre while taking a radical approach to image-making and storytelling.

[Cimino's] aim was total immersion and he achieved it, for better or worse. He leaned heavily on a classical visual representation of the U.S, a vein first struck by Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven a few years earlier. The word "Heaven" in both titles is no accident. They strove to present the United States as a paradise lost, a notion borrowed from American realist painters.

When I first encountered Heaven's Gate, the full-length cut residing forgotten on VHS in my local video store, I was bewildered, impressed, and finally smitten. Today, Heaven's Gate is one of my favourite films in a way that has little to do with the way it was received and everything to do with what Cimino was trying to achieve.

To call Heaven's Gate visually hypnotic would be an understatement. But what's often not discussed is how moving the film is despite its meandering emotional focus. Unlike most westerns, which usually bemoan the loss of an individual person or ideal, Heaven's Gate mourns the death of community.

Heaven's Gate may be a fascinating object of late-'70s excess, but it remains the decade's least fulfilled so-called visionary epic: It still turns Wyoming's fierce Johnson County War into an interminable slog, it still hasn't a single coherent performance to speak of, it still suffers from a murky sound mix that makes you desperate for some audible straight talk and it still screams out its arty archness with every hermetic brownscape.

Watching "Heaven's Gate" for the first time in February I understood how it could mean so many seemingly contradictory things to so many people and why so many dissimilar conclusions could all feel true. The film's scope, natural backdrops, massive sets, complex choreography and cinematography are seductive, at times stunning, and if you like watching swirling people and cameras, you may love it.

Each film's story dramatizes a less than narratively tidy historical event with a love triangle and a few socioeconomic contrivances. But even more crucially, both Carné and Cimino protract their films not with action or chronology, but with pile-ups of speculative human detail—day-to-day textures and tiny tragedies more suggestive of raw life than plot.

Shot for shot, vista for sky-blue vista, this may be the most pictorially beautiful film to fixate on this side of Lawrence of Arabia. (Even a bloody cow carcass dragged over a muddy enclosure leaves a painterly stain.) And like Lawrence, it has a noticeably cavalier attitude toward history, an even sketchier approach to character psychology, and a gleeful willingness to sacrifice narrative coherence for stunning set pieces.

The fundamental underlying theme in all Cimino's films is the great American landscape—geographical and emotional as well as historical. Nowhere does he deal with this theme as lovingly and obsessively as in his most audacious and controversial work, Heaven's Gate, a film whose sheer beauty, emotional power, and unconventional politics have been obfuscated for way too long by the story of its own making and catastrophic American opening.

Those remaining who choose to ignore the surrounding legends--be it of the legendary bomb or the underrated classic--might even find something else: an unmediated connection to the sublime, pastoral magic-hour beauty of the land upon which some poor and huddled masses once helped erect the second greatest social network.

The longer version is impressive as long as the characters and settings remain in long shot; only when the camera gets closer do the problems start. The story is both slow moving and hard to follow, but the locations and period details offer plenty to ponder.