A few years ago for this series, I watched Michael Cimino’s 1978 Oscar-winning war epic The Deer Hunter. It was a very good movie for a sophomore feature, one of the first to reckon with the legacy of Vietnam and do so in a critical way. And at the time Cimino was heralded one of the great new filmmakers to watch. He won an Academy Award, and because of this was given carte blanche on his next passion project -and we’ve heard this story in Hollywood before: the unfortunate narrative of the one-hit-wonder filmmaker like Alex Proyas, Richard Kelly, Neil Blomkamp. Directors whose first movie after a major success not only fails to live up, but seemingly curses the rest of their career. Cimino puts them all to shame with perhaps the greatest and quickest rise and fall of any filmmaker -that both asserted a predominant movement and subsequently brought it to its knees.
Heaven’s Gate is a very significant movie in Hollywood history, though not for the reasons Cimino hoped. One of the biggest financial failures the industry has ever seen and poorly received by critics and audiences at the time, it is credited with ending the mass-budget auteur-driven studio production, and with it arguably the New Hollywood era itself. The following decades would see the industry shift increasingly towards spectacle blockbusters instead, reaching a zenith of dominance in the last decade or so. So for those of us who pine for a bygone age of Hollywood spotlighting originality and experimentation rather than regurgitating tropes and aesthetics and franchises, Heaven’s Gate is the movie we have to blame.
And it is a pretty worthy scapegoat, the epic that flew too close to the sun off of what seems to be a lot of misplaced confidence from United Artists and Cimino himself. As had happened with Apocalypse Now just a year earlier, it went extremely over-budget and over time, albeit without quite the chaotic drama of the earlier film –indeed cast members recall whole days of nothing to do while Cimino endeavored to capture a particular cloud formation or rebuild an entire set for dubious reasons. Yes, Cimino was that kind of auteur, and every production problem seemed to come back to him, the bona fide image of the unchecked indulgent perfectionist filmmaker. He had an over five-hour cut that he initially insisted on, which became three and a half hours released in an extremely unsuccessful limited capacity –finally shortened to two and a half hours for public distribution. Nobody cared or wanted it. Made for 44 million (160 million today) it returned less than an eighth of that at 3.5 million (12 million today). United Artists was nearly bankrupted, eventually having to merge with MGM, and Cimino’s career and reputation would never recover.
For all of this drama and significance I expected Heaven’s Gate to be either a colossal train-wreck or an uproarious masterpiece –the film has been reappraised in recent years by various directors and critics. It is neither of these things though. Actually the movie is just kind of stale, albeit with a strange ambition colouring that staleness. I watched the original three and a half hour cut available through Criterion, but the longer runtime doesn’t disguise many of the flaws pointed out in contemporary reviews. There is something romantic about it, but it’s hard to pin down –it wasn’t after all the last sweeping auteur epic, as Warren Beatty’s Reds followed it a year later, with David Lean’s A Passage to India a couple years after that (both better movies). But there’s a curious pathos to it nonetheless.
The movie is largely set in Wyoming in the early 1890s, and revolves around a dispute between newly arrived cattle barons and immigrant settlers, loosely based on a real conflict known as the Johnson County War. Kris Kristofferson stars as Jim Averill, the new marshal of Casper, who immediately butts heads (or rather fists) with cattle stockman Frank Canton (Sam Waterston), falls for the French bordello madam Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert), competing for her affections with Nate Champion (Christopher Walken) an enforcer for the landlords, and ultimately joining in the immigrant rustlers’ fight against the establishment exploiting and endeavouring to kill them. A very solid, apparently thrilling story for a period epic in the vein of Lawrence of Arabia or Spartacus. It hasn’t much to do with the real history of the Johnson County War or any of the characters named for real people, but that doesn’t necessarily matter for the purposes of storytelling.
But the storytelling is a major issue. Cimino, as the behind-the-scenes stories would bear out, is much more interested in his visuals and individual set-pieces than the cohesion of narrative, which often times the movie is blatantly distracted from in favour of long sequences at a rollerskating rink or a battle at a homestead the stakes of which are hard to determine. Major developments will happen off-screen or in the background, the primary antagonist disappearing for much of the movie, and even the perspective of the underdog immigrants is largely subdued in favour of Averill, a fairly bland masculine fantasy embodiment of a hero not helped by a terribly dull performance from Kristofferson. The logistics of the plot are pretty feeble, several details are unbelievable -just the idea that a “kill list” of settlers would be drawn up and acted upon so brazenly for instance. And the movie fails to find an interesting comment on the central conflict beyond a very basic ethical one. There’s no sense of critique of manifest destiny here, no sustained commentary on the evils of corporate America or the plight of immigrants. It very much seems like Cimino just wanted to do a western, and settled on the subject matter simply out of convenience.
Whatever else though, his thrill shows through, the movie features some rich Americana atmosphere and astounding visuals courtesy of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who’d shot McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Though I doubt it was worth tearing the whole set down, the recreated Casper looks great, and the geography in general evokes a real grandeur that Cimino likes to frequently position his characters against (like he frames a long shot of Averill and Watson in bed together with a picaresque view out an open window in the middle). The film conveys its sense of place incredibly well, every scene seems lit naturally, every element immediate, each era-appropriate detail authentic (perhaps too authentic -the film was accused of some very probable cruelty to animals, including the killing of horses, cows, and chickens). The movie grasps for a sense of honesty, in images if not in plot, and you get the sense of Cimino’s mournfulness of such aesthetic qualities falling out of favour by the end of the 70s. That power does ultimately come across.
At the same time, Cimino’s ambition isn’t particularly unique. There’s some truth I find to Pauline Kael’s later comment on his approach: “He works completely derivatively, from earlier movies, and his only idea of how to dramatize things is to churn up this surface and get it roiling.” He has a keen eye for visuals, but beyond that there’s nothing much in his artistry to set him apart. Watching those best-framed sequences of Heaven’s Gate I thought of John Ford, Sergio Leone, Gone With the Wind and Giant -and it’s not necessarily that Cimino is lesser than those but that there’s not much creative distinction. And several of his other artistic choices aren’t particularly focused, such as the long graduate dance at Harvard near the beginning of the film that gets Cimino’s thematic point across in less than half the time it takes to play out. It forecasts a few more indulgent sequences that don’t earn their drawn-out nature, especially as Cimino struggles to find versatile ways to shoot them. This is quite true of the battle sequences in the last act, which are a fair bit hectic and uncoordinated as well. Clearly the impression is meant to be Lean and Lawrence of Arabia, but Cimino is working on a smaller canvas and with a greater reliance on expensive effects, including a handful of explosions that obscure the action. It’s a strangely boring climax for this and the final shoot-out a rather muted imitation of the end of The Wild Bunch.
But it is a sign of Cimino’s reputation following The Deer Hunter the various licenses he has with this movie. The cast is pretty impressive, led by Kristofferson at the height of his fame, as well as Walken fresh off his Deer Hunter Oscar win, and Huppert right as her career was taking off in France –in more than a few ways she is poorly served by this movie and her thin character. Jeff Bridges is also featured, as is an unrecognizable Brad Dourif. And if you pay close attention you’ll spot in their earliest screen roles Mickey Rourke, Willem Dafoe, and Terry O’Quinn. The most interesting appearance is that of John Hurt, playing Averell’s ideologue college buddy Irving –who gives a stupendous speech in the preface (which also features a cameo from Joseph Cotten as his reverend ideological rival) only to show up in Casper as a forlorn drunk and later a patsy to Canton. This character is something of a cautionary tale, leaving an indelible mark on the movie as by far its most compelling story point; yet it also seems a waste of Hurt, who gives a stronger performance than any of the leads. And the production was so lengthy that purportedly he went off and made The Elephant Man while waiting for his call. Hurt earned an Oscar nomination for that. Heaven’s Gate would not be so lucky.
There’s a degree to which Heaven’s Gate is underwhelming, as there is with just about every movie labeled the worst ever. This one seems to have gotten that designation just because of its repercussions and its scale, the drama of its production and personality of its director. There are several qualities it does have, it’s never obnoxious or flagrantly offensive; it has a soul if nothing else. But I don’t think it’s some underappreciated gem, as even its grand sense of place, its visual splendor, and atmosphere, aren’t quite innovative or interesting enough to overcome its more banal conventions and broad statements. It is an integral touchstone in Hollywood history, worth considering and studying, but not so much watching.
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