"Heaven's Gate," to my mind, is not the near-masterpiece a lot of revisionist critics and movie-lovers have predictably named it in the last few years. I can understand the many reasons behind giving the film a second chance: it was an unprecedented box office failure when it first came out in 1980; the critics at the time, lead by the great Vincent Canby of the New York Times, tore it to ribbons; the director, Michael Cimino, before proclaimed as one of the most promising of New Hollywood directors, has had next to nothing for a career in movie-making since; there's a lot of famous actors in the movie, two of whom are making their feature-length debut; and it's based on a true event.
And on top of that, who wouldn't want to like it? Apart from the obvious (only the world's biggest cynic wouldn't want to enjoy a movie that runs 216 minutes), "Heaven's Gate" is a big, blustery epic. I happen to love big, blustery epics, especially ones set in the Old West. Now Michael Cimino, it goes without saying, did not want to make one of the biggest box office and critical flops of all time; he just wanted to tell a fictionalized account of the Johnson County War. But his film is insipidly tedious and incoherent, and every passing minute is more unendurably soulless than the one that comes before it.
There is a vast, grand-scale vision, to the point where Cimino almost seems to have been shy about photographing a close-up of anyone or anything. And sometimes the camera does move in ways that are undeniably interesting—sweeping up and over a laundry line of bed sheets to reveal homesteaders as they finish butchering a cow. There's also a shot in the second half which recalls the haunting moment in Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" when the bandits came flooding over the hilltops. Kurosawa's picture—which did not have the timely advantage of a wide-angle lens, by the way—also ran just under four hours in length, but was constantly moving, even in its quieter moments. Each scene had a purpose and appropriately wrapped itself up as needed, not as in the case of "Heaven's Gate," where ninety percent of the concluding shots consist of two people sitting in a room, looking either off-screen or at their toes. Also not in service is the photography, which is filled with so much visual dust that it looks as though the camera and the set had been separated by a dirty window.
Maybe Cimino's idea for the dramatic scenes was to mimic another great Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. Here, the camera hardly ever moves; the static shots linger on too long and pile on top of one another with no particular style or rhythm. And in many of these interior-set, would-be dramatic scenes, in which characters just repeat points they made clear many times before, I think I came to better understand Vincent Canby's review, in which he compared the film's unrelenting boredom to a four-hour tour of a living room. Some of these scenes do feel that long, and we are frequently just staring at—guess what?—a room. The Academy Award-nominated art direction is authentically detailed and good-looking, but even the prettiest picture can lose its interest after a while.
The cast of "Heaven's Gate" is rich with talent, but only one man has a good part to act, and that's the underrated Sam Waterston, virtually unrecognizable compared to his now-famous district attorney in "Law & Order," this time playing a cruel land commissioner. Everybody else is stiff like a corpse and packed with mawkish emotion. The would-be love triangle between Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken—playing enforcers on opposite sides of the law—and an immigrant prostitute portrayed by Isabelle Huppert is utilized with no apparent motive except to tell us that a man and a woman, even if they come from different parts of the world, can fall in love. Any intelligent person from the 20th or 21st century already knows that. The point is obvious, so why not instill this dynamic with so passion? When Kristofferson and Huppert fondle and kiss in their first moment together, it feels forced; the actors seem outside their comfort zones. They don't really seem warm and affectionate, or even erotic, toward one another.
John Hurt's also in the movie, playing a dimmer version of his usual wisecracking philosopher. But all of these people have no interest with one another, and yet so much of the story focuses on two or three folks just whispering to one another in an enclosed space. Now when the battles between the homesteaders and the mercenaries begin, Cimino promises some exciting action. The first bit—where an innocent man is brutally murdered—is excellently handled. The Foley, in particular, is marvelous. But each of the three subsequent violent sequences is less exhilarating the one before it, not helped in the least by the 10-20 minutes of drippy melodrama stuffed in between.
"Heaven's Gate" is not one of the worst movies ever made, but it is awfully tempting, for me, to call it just that. For 216 minutes, it left me writhing with boredom and frustration, only occasionally interested. I can forgive the movie's pointless prologue of a beginning, for it does feature what is probably the best scene set to the "Blue Danube" waltz since "2001: A Space Odyssey." But the ending, which is factually much shorter but seems so much longer, is an incoherent and confusing fiasco. As is much of what happens in the middle. So, no, the movie is not particularly worth rediscovering as far as I am concerned. Yes, Michael Cimino is a brilliant talent, and he deserved a better chance to redeem himself. But that's no excuse for mislabeling one of the clunkiest pictures ever made as a masterpiece.
And on top of that, who wouldn't want to like it? Apart from the obvious (only the world's biggest cynic wouldn't want to enjoy a movie that runs 216 minutes), "Heaven's Gate" is a big, blustery epic. I happen to love big, blustery epics, especially ones set in the Old West. Now Michael Cimino, it goes without saying, did not want to make one of the biggest box office and critical flops of all time; he just wanted to tell a fictionalized account of the Johnson County War. But his film is insipidly tedious and incoherent, and every passing minute is more unendurably soulless than the one that comes before it.
There is a vast, grand-scale vision, to the point where Cimino almost seems to have been shy about photographing a close-up of anyone or anything. And sometimes the camera does move in ways that are undeniably interesting—sweeping up and over a laundry line of bed sheets to reveal homesteaders as they finish butchering a cow. There's also a shot in the second half which recalls the haunting moment in Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" when the bandits came flooding over the hilltops. Kurosawa's picture—which did not have the timely advantage of a wide-angle lens, by the way—also ran just under four hours in length, but was constantly moving, even in its quieter moments. Each scene had a purpose and appropriately wrapped itself up as needed, not as in the case of "Heaven's Gate," where ninety percent of the concluding shots consist of two people sitting in a room, looking either off-screen or at their toes. Also not in service is the photography, which is filled with so much visual dust that it looks as though the camera and the set had been separated by a dirty window.
Maybe Cimino's idea for the dramatic scenes was to mimic another great Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. Here, the camera hardly ever moves; the static shots linger on too long and pile on top of one another with no particular style or rhythm. And in many of these interior-set, would-be dramatic scenes, in which characters just repeat points they made clear many times before, I think I came to better understand Vincent Canby's review, in which he compared the film's unrelenting boredom to a four-hour tour of a living room. Some of these scenes do feel that long, and we are frequently just staring at—guess what?—a room. The Academy Award-nominated art direction is authentically detailed and good-looking, but even the prettiest picture can lose its interest after a while.
The cast of "Heaven's Gate" is rich with talent, but only one man has a good part to act, and that's the underrated Sam Waterston, virtually unrecognizable compared to his now-famous district attorney in "Law & Order," this time playing a cruel land commissioner. Everybody else is stiff like a corpse and packed with mawkish emotion. The would-be love triangle between Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken—playing enforcers on opposite sides of the law—and an immigrant prostitute portrayed by Isabelle Huppert is utilized with no apparent motive except to tell us that a man and a woman, even if they come from different parts of the world, can fall in love. Any intelligent person from the 20th or 21st century already knows that. The point is obvious, so why not instill this dynamic with so passion? When Kristofferson and Huppert fondle and kiss in their first moment together, it feels forced; the actors seem outside their comfort zones. They don't really seem warm and affectionate, or even erotic, toward one another.
John Hurt's also in the movie, playing a dimmer version of his usual wisecracking philosopher. But all of these people have no interest with one another, and yet so much of the story focuses on two or three folks just whispering to one another in an enclosed space. Now when the battles between the homesteaders and the mercenaries begin, Cimino promises some exciting action. The first bit—where an innocent man is brutally murdered—is excellently handled. The Foley, in particular, is marvelous. But each of the three subsequent violent sequences is less exhilarating the one before it, not helped in the least by the 10-20 minutes of drippy melodrama stuffed in between.
"Heaven's Gate" is not one of the worst movies ever made, but it is awfully tempting, for me, to call it just that. For 216 minutes, it left me writhing with boredom and frustration, only occasionally interested. I can forgive the movie's pointless prologue of a beginning, for it does feature what is probably the best scene set to the "Blue Danube" waltz since "2001: A Space Odyssey." But the ending, which is factually much shorter but seems so much longer, is an incoherent and confusing fiasco. As is much of what happens in the middle. So, no, the movie is not particularly worth rediscovering as far as I am concerned. Yes, Michael Cimino is a brilliant talent, and he deserved a better chance to redeem himself. But that's no excuse for mislabeling one of the clunkiest pictures ever made as a masterpiece.