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| Images courtesy of Janus Films |
Following the release of the 1978 Best Picture winning
Vietnam war drama The Deer Hunter, writer-director Michael Cimino
quickly shot to the top ranks of the New Hollywood filmmaking community
alongside Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin and Warren Beatty as far as
boundary pushing dramatic storytellers working on large canvases with bountiful
resources. In an era of the director-driven
movie canonized by the United Artists film company originally formed by Douglas
Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, Cimino emerged at
a time when the New Hollywood movement was at its height. However, unlike his contemporaries who turned
over films quickly for United Artists on reasonable budgets and shooting
schedules, Michael Cimino was meticulous to such a degree that his next project
all but brought a swift and for many an angry end to the director-driven era:
the infamously sprawling, expansive and piled-upon megaflop Heaven’s Gate. A portrait of the very real Wyoming 1892 Johnson
County range war in which cattle barons invaded a mostly Slavic settlers’ commune
to murder them for supposedly stealing cattle, it was a subject touched upon in
Shane and The Virginian but not to the graphic and unglamorous
degrees of Cimino’s epic.
A film that became a media sensation after word began to
trickle out Heaven’s Gate was shaping up to be the most expensive film
ever made following a journal posing as an extra on the set wrote a hit piece
that doomed the film well before anyone saw a finished print, Michael Cimino’s
film singlehandedly destroyed his reputation as well as United Artists who
found themselves putting all of their eggs in one basket with this picture. Costing a whopping $44 million, Heaven’s
Gate took in a measly $3.5 million and was originally released in 219-minute
form for one week before Cimino made the hasty mistake of pulling the film from
theaters and re-releasing it months later in a 149-minute shorter version. Critics had their teeth out for it before,
during and after the film’s release and the era where directors controlled the
money and maintained creative autonomy was eventually rescinded by the studio
system. Over time, Cimino made more
films but never attained the creative freedom he briefly enjoyed on his harshly
maligned epic both seen and sight unseen by many.
Much of the anger levied against the film involved its sepia
monochromatic look lensed by Vilmos Zsigmond in scope 2.35:1 which made sitting
through Heaven’s Gate something of an endurance for many. But in 2012, following a new slightly revised
edition of the film overseen by Michael Cimino with the original three separate
technicolor stems scanned in 4K and recomposited together with the sepia tint
toned down considerably, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival
followed by The Criterion Collection releasing it on Blu-Ray disc for the first
time. Now years after the furor has died
down, audiences have a chance to reassess and rethink their ire aimed at a film
that never really got a chance to speak properly for nonjudgmental eyes and
ears to see and hear. Despite numerous
controversies including but not limited to animal cruelty including an
unsimulated cockfight and assertions of horses being killed during the
climactic battle sequence as well as the taking of artistic liberties involving
some of the characters such as the central triangular relationship between Kris
Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert, Heaven’s Gate may
well be cinema history’s greatest miscarriage of journalistic integrity. To call Heaven’s Gate a spectacularly
jaw dropping screen epic vision of the American west closer to how it was
really lived rather than how it has been romanticized in film for so long is
still selling it short.
Opening on a prologue not dissimilar to the Slavic-American
wedding characterizing the first hour of The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s
Gate begins in 1870 at Harvard College following the graduation party of
two classroom pals Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and Billy Irvine (John Hurt). Though seemingly like an overblown spectacle,
this prologue is key in establishing the different directions and places of the
eventual impending Johnson County War these two characters will end up. Twenty years later, Averill makes a pit stop
at Casper, Wyoming on his way to Johnson County working as a marshal, catching
early wind of the simmering conflicts between impoverished immigrants and
wealthy cattle barons. At the same time,
Irvine at a board meeting gets wind of a new plot being enforced by Nate
Champion (Christopher Walken) and association leader Frank Canton (Sam
Waterston) to systematically exterminate 125 settlers named on a drawn-up
list. The situation intensifies when a
local French-Canadian madam Ellen Watson (Isabelle Huppert) running a brothel
in Johnson County gets into a romantic triangle with Averille and Champion and
it comes to light she and her brothel are in fact on the death list.
A sweeping, epic yet uncompromisingly brutal and vicious
vision of the American West with all the gory ugliness and immaculately
beautiful natural splendor violently smashed together, Heaven’s Gate despite
not having forward thrust of say a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood starring
western seeps into your DNA over the course of its mammoth running time. Long but never boring as the small-time
skirmishes, personal relations and simmering grudges eventually careen towards
all out war in an astonishing battle sequence reminiscent of Seven Samurai,
Cimino’s film isn’t so much a screen portrait as it feels like a fully realized
and lived in world. Not all doom and
gloom so much as just how people coped with the unfair unforgiving realities of
their lives in the harsh American west, it features a whimsical roller-skating
contest that perfectly encapsulates the sense of community running through the
Johnson County populace both in carefree frivolities and coming together in unison
against a common enemy. Featuring a
lovely yet pained melancholic acoustic guitar strumming score by David Mansfield
who also plays the film’s violinist, the best way to describe the unfolding of Heaven’s
Gate is lyrical and perhaps even akin to Sam Peckinpah’s equally rough and
ragged Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
Controversies aside, the film is a largely passionate and
brilliantly acted ensemble piece largely centered around the three principal
characters played with conviction and commitment by Kris Kristofferson,
Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert.
Kristofferson who himself played the aforementioned Billy the Kid in the
Peckinpah film is no stranger to the American Western picture and with his
overcoat, beard and top hat he achieves an overarching screen presence as the
film’s privileged hero caught in the middle of a class war and territory
dispute. Christopher Walken fresh off of
his Oscar win from The Deer Hunter looks unrecognizable in a mustache
but explodes onto the screen quite literally in one of the film’s early scenes
of assassinating a Slavic migrant.
Isabelle Huppert’s casting was apparently the source of great
controversy within the studio who objected to her in the role against Cimino’s
unbending insistence and she shows no fear of screen nudity including but not
limited to a brief scene of sexual assault which is rough to sit through but
also fuels her own participation in fighting back against the invading
murderous cattle barons led by a nefariously evil and fascistic Sam Waterston
in one of his career best performances.
One of the virtues of the film’s sprawling length is the
attention it pays to smaller side characters such as Brad Dourif, Jeff Bridges,
Richard Masur, Terry O’Quinn and even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it early screen
appearance by both Willem Dafoe and Mickey Rourke. Just about each and everyone one gets equal
time, particularly Jeff Bridges who almost becomes a fourth principal character
in Cimino’s saga. So by the time the
long-awaited active battle between the barons and the settlers arrives and tertiary
characters start falling by way of the bullet or exploding bomb, we feel
something akin to dismay or sadness in seeing fellow comrades dropping
dead. In any other screen epic, the
deaths of settlers and people on the other side of the gunfire including wouldn’t
have registered with the same weight they do here. Let it be said the battle sequence itself,
however violent and however many injuries and or deaths-to-horses there might
be in the footage, is among the greatest western action scenes ever created and
for a film that takes such meticulous time in establishing the groundwork being
laid for this fight it suddenly roars to hyperactive unrelenting life.
By now you already know how things turned out for Heaven’s
Gate and what the consequences were for the film industry and viewing
public at large stemming from it so there’s no need to go over it again. But even after everything penned down here,
even days after seeing it won’t leave me alone, you still don’t really know
what Heaven’s Gate is until you’ve blocked out time for a proper sit
down with it. A movie that functions
like a mile high tidal wave, gathering speed and strength slowly before its
towering crest crashes down not only on you but through you, Criterion’s
restoration and release of Heaven’s Gate is breathtaking and the film is
a magnificent flower previously prevented from fully blooming by a critical
establishment with their own private agendas to fulfill. Though the court of public opinion still
mostly regards the picture as a career and studio ending iconic flop, hopefully
over time with this frankly beautiful Criterion release that will start to
shift more in the film’s favor. There
has never been an epic American western quite like it before and tragically it
is doubtful we’ll ever see one remotely like it on the silver screen ever
again.
--Andrew Kotwicki
