I have just watched Heaven’s Gate as an act of curiosity, having it praised as a kind of masterpiece even with its tattered history of a fiasco by a friend. Lots of movies did not get their just due until years after their making — The Magnificent Ambersons comes to mind as well as The Touch of Evil. Some movies I have seen I did not “get” or appreciate until I saw them two or three times, such as La Dolce Vita ( first viewed in 1960) as well Jarmusch’s Dead Man (a masterpiece of deconstruction of the west).With this in mind I was quite open to Heaven’s Gate. I was disappointed upon viewing it for the very first time, the original director’s cut. It was a bomb.
On an old IQ test I was asked if I could interpret this quotation or it put it into my own words: “One swallow does not a summer make.” I can say it aptly applies to Cimino’s movie. All the glorious shots of western vistas, pastures and plains, of recreated towns, the staged mise en scene cannot substitute nor support the lack of a coherent story line. Forster said we need to connect, here Cimino is in a state of directorial disconnect. Watching this movie was watching paint dry, that old cliche. Wait — it does apply; here we have the latest Benjamin Moore palette of colors but not applied with purpose, design or coherence.
Details in damascene application cannot make a movie. My rule is simple: Do I feel? My wife’s rule is: Do I care for these people? On both accounts no. Definitely not. There is an unheralded movie by Kevin Costner, Open Range, with Robert Duvall, Annette Bening and Costner that deals with a similar theme, range wars, the ins, the outs, the native sons and the immigrants, but in half the showing time depicts all these issues with Eastwoodian clarity. And we care about these people. A shootout that lasts about 20 minutes is brilliantly staged by Costner, and often I will watch the picture again and again just for that superior sequence, far better than any shootout in Heaven’s Gate, or the staged, stilted and overly theatrical High Noon. Costner’s shootout is the new standard.
Cimino ran way over budget and that is another story, but he is no Welles who produced a superior product only to have it chopped to pieces. In fact there are four editors for 216 minutes of this film and obviously they were not of one mind. While watching the flic Jane and I would turn to one another and say why did he linger so long on that, because we got it, and secondly, why was that necessary in terms of advancing the story? So we began to verbally edit the picture. We distanced ourselves from what we were watching, so uninvolving was the story. Cut here, cut that, that isn’t necessary and so on. When you do that to a picture and Jane walked away several times only to return to see if my patience was still holding out, you know you have a dead mackerel here.
I read the enclosed pamphlet with an essay by an European who praised Cimino’s use of space, the theme of loss and so on (academic rubbish) and then I read Cimino’s interview in the 80s about the movie and what I got was a rationalization that was immense, aptly suited for a film that was impressive for its failure to make us care one whit. I returned to my original feelings which are that Cimino got carried away with set pieces, environmental beauty, staged dances, and lost his characters in the flora and fauna. What we have here is cinematic elephantiasis
As to the actors: Isabelle Huppert steals the show; Christopher Walken is so young here that in close-ups his face takes on the mask of a Tatar warrior, long before he introduced his quirkiness; Sam Waterston is very good, so good that I was waiting for him to get killed. I like actors that make you despise them. And we have Kris Kristofferson who is the equivalent of an animated ironing board, oh is he dreadful. His acting range runs the gamut from A to B. Walken would have been much better in his role. John Hurt is wasted as some kind of Greek chorus. Jeff bridges is Jeff Bridges here, no intimation of what he could do later on. The American West in all its National Geographic wonderment is the star here.
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