HEAVEN'S GATE (1980) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Michael Cimino
Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Walken,
Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Sam Waterston,
Brad Dourif, Mickey Rourke, Joseph Cotten,
Richard Masur, Geoffrey Lewis, Terry O'Quinn
Michael Cimino's epic western about the Johnson County War was notorious long before its 1980 release. The object of massive bad press even during filming, it was trashed by the critics, yanked from distribution, and drastically recut on its way to becoming Hollywood's most legendary box-office flop. Cimino's ambition going in was to create the "Gone
With the Wind" of westerns. That he failed isn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on how you feel about "Gone With the Wind". The director's own three-and-a-half-hour cut, viewed on a big screen, is an impressive piece of work, with echoes of "Doctor Zhivago", "The Godfather", "Days of Heaven" and maybe a little Eisenstein, while its depiction of prejudice and violence as part of the immigrant experience in 19th-century America prefigures "Gangs of New York". The deliberate pace takes some getting used to, a little more backstory on the relationship between the characters played by Walken and Kristofferson would've helped, and Walken's eye makeup can be kind of distracting. But Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is never less than stunning, and Cimino's wide-screen compositions look like paintings come to life. Whether "Heaven's Gate" could've made money under any circumstances is questionable. At the dawn of the Reagan era, folks weren't much interested in reexamining the greed, intolerance and slaughter that are as much a part of our frontier past as the heroics we like to romanticize. But for me, I'd rather spend 219 minutes of my life watching this again than hang out with Scarlett O'Hara any day.
Michael Cimino
(1939-2016)
