Stream it now Heaven's Gate 1980

 

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This is a failed masterpiece. The very biggest failure of this movie is the duration: too, too long, and obiouvsly full of useless scenes. The best things are the performance of the actors: K. Kristofferson, I. Huppert and C. Walken are very good.

*n*

horrible

excruciatingly tiresome! it contains so many unnecessary long mass scenes, that you start to wonder what in earth was the director's intention. a realistic depiction? come on. I've seen more realistic depictions on the bottom of my toilet, thank you.

an epic disaster. too long, with too many questions opened, without a solution in the story as well as in the shooting. probably the most pompous empty movie ever.

Not So Much a Film as a Death March

Before Ishtar, before Howard the Duck, there was Heaven's Gate. At the time, the most famous flop in movie history. Oh, there are many others before it; there will be many others to come. But Heaven's Gate holds a special place in Hollywood history. For one, it's got at least one thing on those first two, and that's about two hours. Rumour has it that the original cut that director Michael Cimino provided to the studio was over five and a half hours. Now, first off, who writes a script that long? I mean, okay, lots of people. But who knows the industry and thinks, "Hey, I can do a five and a half hour film! America's ready for that." Only it turns out no. No, America wasn't. America won't be any time soon. The theatrical release was only about two and a half hours. It did not do well in the theatres or with the critics. Now available is the over three and a half hour version. It is very long. For one thing, it shows that Cimino has no real filter. He thinks it looks cool, so there it goes onscreen.

What I keep coming back to is a quote from the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide to Mystery Science Theater 3000. "A lot of stuff happens, but nevertheless, this is a boldly plotless movie." We start in what we will pretend is Harvard and totally not Oxford. There is a graduation ceremony. I don't know why. (I don't know why the epilogue is there, either. We move on.) And then Kris Kristofferson is a small-town sheriff in middle-of-nowhere Wyoming. His community is largely immigrant, and apparently, they live on rustling from the local cattle barons. There's even a whorehouse that accepts cattle instead of money. (I hope you get a lot of credit for that cow!) The cattle barons put out a kill list of practically everyone in the county, with Christopher Walken as their lead hitman. Because everyone knows Christopher Walken is evil, so that's great. Sam Waterston is also evil. Evil for all. And they kill a lot of immigrants.

The immigrant-killing scene is the one that really comes to mind for me in "oh, my Gods, this goes on too long!" I don't know how long it actually is. It feels like about an hour. Rumour (there's a lot of rumour about this movie) has it that that in the original cut of this film, this part of it was as long as a movie all by itself. Once again, I really want to know why he thought people would sit there for this. Much discussion is had about the money aspects of the film, and Cimino wasted a lot of money. There are all kinds of stories, though how many of those are true is kind of up for grabs. At any rate, it is simply true that the filming itself wasted money. It did. Apparently, Cimino shot about a million and a half feet of film. Assuming he used 35 millimeter, a fairly safe assumption, that's about 2777 hours of film, if I've done the math right. Now, of course, every filmmaker shoots more film than they're planning to use. Of course! For one thing, there's wide angles and closeups. Unless you're Ed Wood, you're going to shoot more than you're going to use. But that's about a thousand hours of film shot for every hour shown in the theatre.

Is it a good movie other than that? Meh. It's beautiful, certainly. Whatever else you want to say about the film or the man, hey, it's a beautiful film. Whatever other failings he had, Cimino did choose a great location. (Though apparently there was an equally great but cheaper one he didn't use.) I'm not terribly jazzed about the dialogue, as I said, and I had a hard time keeping track of who any of these people were or what they were doing. Or, in fact, caring. I could just sit and watch the lovely scenery, except when they were in gloomy interiors or full of corpses or whatever. The great sweep of the scenery, beautifully filmed, is a selling point for a lot of the middle of the movie. I just don't really think Cimino has much of a feel for people. The Deer Hunter, his previous film, was good, but I still felt kind of distant.

For what I think are obvious reasons, this was the real end of Cimino's career. He's directed a total of eight movies. The next one was five years after Heaven's Gate. His check was cashed, basically. Unfortunately, he kind of ruined it for everyone else. There is a limit to how much free rein they're willing to let you have. Even the most successful of directors still have to make an awful lot of potboilers to make what they really want to. It doesn't matter how successful you are most of the time; there's only so many flops they'll let you have the money to make. Now, of course, Hollywood is a business. I do get that. I also firmly believe it's our own fault that a lot of the crap in theatres gets made, because we don't go see the good stuff. How many of you saw Frost/Nixon in the theatre? A friend of mine said he wasn't going to bother, because it was two people in a room talking. Which is, of course, true. But if we don't go see it, and if we don't go see the better Heaven's Gates out there (you know, better than the actual), they're not going to keep making them.

Lavish, superb production, insanely overlong as well as boring. Michael Cimino is a classic case of a director who got too big for his britches. It could have been great, but the director's narcissism did it in. But wow, what sets, costumes and period detail.

(* 1/2):

There is such a great movie hidden under this but it is all but ruined by Cimino's direction. It had the potential of Epic Western greatness but it is all wasted in this 3 and half+ hour, underdeveloped, flop.

Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate has achieved a certain legendary status. Its huge budget and dismal box office nearly bankrupted United Artists, leading to the studio's acquisition by MGM. The title became a catchphrase for any costly fiasco and the film was fodder for stand-up comedians for a few years.

A decade later, some critics revisited Heaven's Gate, declaring that its horrid reputation was undeserved and that the movie was actually quite good.

Don't believe it.

There is a decent enough movie buried somewhere in Heaven's Gate. But to find it you will have to dig through over three and a half hours of some of the most flagrant excess I've ever seen. The film tells the story of the Johnson County Wars, a real historical event in 1890 Wyoming. The region had attracted a large population of Russian and Eastern European immigrants. Poverty-stricken and finding that Wyoming wasn't particularly good farming country, some of these immigrants took to stealing cattle for food. Receiving no help from the Johnson County legal system, the local cattlemen's association brought in a bunch of hired guns to murder over one hundred of the immigrants. Heaven's Gate mostly concerns itself with a few key characters in the incident. Kris Kristofferson gives a fine and natural performance as the Johnson County sheriff. John Hurt is a bit over the top as his fellow Harvard grad buddy who is now a complete drunkard and a member of the cattlemen's association. Christopher Walken gives his standard eerie, menacing portrayal as the sheriff's friend who is now heading up the death squad. Isabelle Huppert is lovely if not especially believable as the prostitute whom both Walken and Kristofferson love. Sam Waterston is bizarrely effeminate as the head of the cattlemen. And Jeff Bridges is his usual affable self as one of the few successful businessmen in Johnson County. (He owns a large building that seems to be a bar, a roller skating rink and/or a dormitory at various times.)

The heart of Heaven's Gate is the love triangle between Kristofferson, Huppert and Walken, set against the backdrop of the immigrant experience in the American West. By itself, there is nothing wrong with this kernel. But it seems as though Cimino went into filming with only a hint of a script and little idea what his film was going to actually be about. So he just filmed everything that occurred to him. Thus we are treated to an opening 20 minute scene of a Harvard graduation which includes a completely incomprehensible valedictory speech by Hurt, an interminable dance sequence and an unexplained mob brawl... all of which tells us absolutely nothing about the characters and seems to serve no purpose at all except to let us know that Hurt and Kristofferson went to Harvard together. Cimino continues this pattern for the entire movie, giving us lengthy sequences which show off his attention to period detail but add nothing at all to the narrative. There are those who criticize Lawrence of Arabia for similar reasons. My counter is that at least the scenery on LoA was pretty. Cimino's Wyoming (and most of its residents) is ugly, grey, dusty, grimy and sooty, making the meandering extraneous scenes even more tortuous.

And then Cimino apparently decided to forego the editing process, putting every single frame he filmed up on the screen. The result is an unmitigated mess--a collection of disconnected scenes that both confuse and bury the narrative. A strange sepia tone filter pops in at occasional intermittent (and inexplicable) times, further disconnecting the viewer from the movie and even the movie from itself.

I also felt as if Cimino decided he didn't need a sound editor either. Several of the most important bits of dialogue take place against a lot of background noise and the lines are completely lost. In contrast, we have no problem hearing the Russian/Slavic dialogue of the immigrants. This actually makes up the majority of the spoken dialogue in the movie and is, for some reason, not subtitled. All this, of course, simply furthers the viewer's confusion, making it impossible to follow the movie closely. Even if you have been making a concerted effort to follow the wisps of disconnected narrative visually, the poor sound editing will defeat your efforts.

There's a Hollywood clich