Heaven's Gate Movie Review

Heaven’s Gate is not, as its reputation suggests, the worst Hollywood movie ever made. Looked at in a certain light it even has some brilliance to it, and at stray moments you can even forget that Michael Cimino’s film is now a three-and-a-half-hour metaphor for the hubris of ego and the dangers of not watching your budget. (Heaven’s Gate had an original budget of $7.5 million, eventually cost a whopping $44 million, took in less than $2 million at the box office, financially kneecapped United Artists, and scotched Cimino’s career as a director. The gory details, wonderfully told, are all in the book Final Cut, written by then-UA production exec Steven Bach.) Strip away the behind-the-scenes story, and Heaven’s Gate is an enigma, as difficult to like as it is to dismiss. It is arrogant and it is beautiful. It is thematically clever and rhetorically dull. It is sensitive and it is condescending. It has enormous ambition and winds up with nothing to say. Eventually, it’s just sadly exhausting.

One thing’s for certain: Kris Kristofferson is blameless. A solid if not terribly nuanced actor, he plays James Averill, an upstanding marshal who arrives Johnson County, Wyoming to investigate rumors of turmoil there. It’s worse than he imagines; as the station agent explains when Averill arrives, Johnson County (not Cimino) has become “the asshole of creation,” thanks to ongoing bloodshed between wealthy WASP landowners and the immigrant settlers who try to work their small parcels of land. The landowners are led by the obscenely amoral Frank Canton (Sam Waterston, razor-sharp), who draws up a “death list” of 125 Johnson County residents who are legally approved to be killed under false accusations of thievery.

On the list is Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert), the local whore who’s beloved by Averill but also courted by Canton’s lackey and Averill’s old friend Nate Champion (Christopher Walken). The personal and political tensions gather steam until the film’s conclusion, a half-hour bloodbath that features at least half a dozen poor decisions about plot (including one, involving a suicide, that’s completely indefensible). Like The Deer Hunter, Cimino’s previous film, Heaven’ s Gate is supposed to be an allegorical tale about how easily American pluralism can shift into authoritarianism. But Cimino has no real feel for his characters – the immigrants who are supposed to be the heroes are given to us as a weeping, screaming mass. Kristofferson’s Averill is appropriately stoic, but he lacks layers. And Huppert’s casting as Ella was an enormous misstep. Speaking in a French accent so thick it’s occasionally indecipherable, she’s a weak actress in a role that’s completely wrong for her. Plus, because she’s supposed to be the fulcrum between Averill and Champion, she winds up dulling those two characters as well.

Now, you’re probably thinking: What would help here is weighing down the movie with a half-hour introduction set 20 years earlier that sheds precisely no light on the main plot. More than the acting and the script, it’s the structure of Heaven’s Gate that botches the film. To be fair, much of the movie looks utterly gorgeous, and Cimino (along with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond) meticulously crafted dozens of shots that look as well-lit and well-composed as paintings. The size of the Great Plains are exploited well in the panoramic shots of the region, capturing the sky, mountains, and general enormity of the landscape. And however foolhardy Cimino’s accounting was, the money is there on the screen. The shots of Casper, stuffed full of extras and with buildings stretching far into the distance, give a real sense of both the place and its lawlessness.

But those strengths never congeal into a solid narrative; it’s just Cimino showing off how big he is. The only version that now makes the rounds on video is 219 minutes long, the same one that was first released in 1980 and panned mercilessly; a later release cut out over an hour. But getting rid of some length doesn’t help here, in the same way that cutting off an arm doesn’t help when the cancer’s spread to the whole body. Cimino doesn’t seem to know the people he’s putting on screen, and worse he doesn’t seem to like them much. The same confused contempt he seemed to have for the townspeople in The Deer Hunter bled into Heaven’s Gate as well. A misanthrope to the core, there was no way his attitude could make an effective, trustworthy story about America. Cimino had artistry in spades, but he had no art.