Heaven's Gate (1980)

I love a good Western as much as the next guy. Heck, I love a bad Western, too. I've seen quite a few and know my John Waynes and Randolph Scotts as well as my Lash LaRues and Roy Rogerses. You name it - chances are I've seen it.

What do I like about a Western? That it deals with good old escapist entertainment in its purest form. Good guys and bad guys, last-minute rescues, belief in God and the land, and right always triumphing over wrong. This, of course, was revised somewhat with Sergio Leone and the advent of "Spaghetti Westerns". With them came a more sinister level to the evil, and even the good guys weren't all that good. And they also celebrated the anti-hero; the guy who plays both ends against the middle (like in A Fistful Of Dollars). It was all good, evil was still being vanquished (if just marginally). And then along with "Spaghetti Westerns" came nihilism, where no one wins. Not even the viewer. The good and bad guys are all in the same boat and it's sinking fast. Usually, these had a lot of death, blood, dashed hopes and crushed dreams along with the tumbleweeds and six-shooters. And the bad guys were usually the heroes of the film. For those who were weaned on the heroism and positive qualities of True Grit and My Darling Clementine, this must have been quite a case of disenchantment.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to Heaven's Gate, a film that in and of itself created a legend that no one else could (or has) ever come close to. Not that this is a good thing.

In the mid-and-late-'70s, Michael Cimino had written or co-written some fairly decent movies (Silent Running, Magnum Force) and even directed a film that was met with critical and financial acclaim (Thunderbolt and Lightfoot). It was therefore no huge surprise that Cimino had ambitions to make The Greatest Film Ever Made (c) and prove once and for all that he was the real deal. He had labored for years on a particular film idea: the fight between immigrant landowners and the corrupt cattlemen of the Montana area in 1870. A simple enough idea, and one that may have held the basis for a better-than-average film. After all, we can all get behind the idea of the little guy fighting against the bureaucracy.

His script went through many titles ("The Johnson County War", "Paydirt") and bounced between many studios, producers and actors (Cimino even went as far as sending a draft to Steve McQueen!) and was drafted and re-drafted multiple times. This happened all through the early part of Cimino's career until he got lucky enough to pitch a different script idea to EMI Productions. That idea became The Deer Hunter and went on to earn money, win awards and give a new-found clout to Cimino, who was now poised to finally bring his long-standing dream project to fruition. Fate lent a hand when several top executives walked out of United Artists and formed Orion Pictures (which ironically folded a decade or so later). UA's new VP, Steven Bach, then took up the option for Cimino's script, wanting UA to benefit from having an "Oscar-winning director" and be a part of his winning streak.

And so Heaven's Gate came to be. Its budget was to be a comparatively conservative $7.8 million and Cimino would have full rein as director.

Now before I get into the logistics, let me explain the story in its basic terms. Idealistic Harvard graduate James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) becomes a sheriff in the semi-tamed Wyoming territory. In his duties, he comes across a plot by the Wyoming Cattlemen's Association to murder several immigrants who are stealing their cattle to survive. As Averill tries to foil their plans, he also maintains a romance with local brother madam Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert) while dealing with Association gunman/best friend Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who is also having an affair with Watson. And yes, that does sound more like a soap opera than a "classic" Western. But Heaven's Gate has more going on in it than just a simplistic story....

The megalomaniac tendencies of Cimino on the set of Gate are now the stuff of legend; at one point, he decided the space between buildings on one set didn't look right, despite being built to his specifications, and had both sides of the street torn down and rebuilt for $1.2 million. Shooting of the film as a whole lasted over a year and resulted in over 1 million feet of film being shot (and processed) - on average a typical film uses at most 100,000 feet, just to put that into perspective. And as if that weren't enough, Cimino also went as far as to supervise the period dressing of every person on camera, have an old steam engine locomotive transported in from several states away, tack on a prologue and epilogue to the film long after shooting on the project began (costing another $5 million) and re-shoot even the smallest scenes multiple times to make sure that he "got it right". With all of this going on it's no wonder the budget skyrocketed from $7.8 million to $44 million.

And something else - the film's initial cut clocked in at nearly FIVE HOURS AND THIRTY MINUTES (the final battle in Gate is rumored to have been the full length of a regular motion picture). Later, after editing it down to three hours and thirty-nine minutes, it was presented to theaters worldwide. Critics, naturally, were waiting with glee after catching wind of all the troubles UA was having in keeping Cimino in line (and on budget). Not that length itself is a concern, mind you, provided that the characters are worth watching and investing that much time in.

They're not.

Kristofferson acts as though he were bored stiff and suffering from a mild hangover throughout. Walken, a great actor when wound up tight, is distressingly soft-spoken and not really all that convincing, either when killing good and bad guys or professing his love to Huppert. And speaking of Huppert, her role consists mostly of stripping off her clothes at every opportunity, and not much else. And for having great actors involved like John Hurt, Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Geoffrey Lewis, Mickey Rourke, Richard Masur and Terry O'Quinn, none of them really contribute much to either the story or their characters; they simply wear their period clothes and say their lines. The best that can be said is that Hurt looks appropriately drunk through all of his scenes.

A word about the look of the film. Famed cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond made various panoramic shots look appropriately breath-taking and awe-inspiring. However, the film's overall look is simply an excuse to fill the screen with billows of smoke, clouds of dust and impenetrable fog - why bother having great background scenery if you're just going to obliterate it with opaque foreground smoke? There's one scene that isn't even all that important (it's when Kristofferson is piling a drunken Jeff Bridges into the back of a wagon) where Cimino decides to shoot in a faded brown, washed-out manner of an old tintype, which matches nothing else in the film. The editing itself is another matter; many of the principle characters aren't even given close-up shots so we can figure out who's doing what.

As I watched Heaven's Gate, I initially thought that no film could be as bad as what I'd heard; there had to be redeeming features in a film of such scope and magnitude. But that's the whole problem: this film has no scope. All of its facts are dubious (the film shows hundreds of people dying when in reality only TWO people died as a result of the actual Johnson County "war") and its characters are inane pawns that serve no purpose or conviction. This is a chess game played by Cimino against the audience in which he has it rigged in his favor. It's Three-Card Monty being played with jokers. Heaven's Gate is a failure on every conceivable entertainment level and caused the fall of United Artists, the firing of Bach and several other executives and, most importantly, a quick plummet from grace by Cimino himself (who's never again had the same control over a film nor again experienced the success of another Deer Hunter or Thunderbolt And Lightfoot). No surprise that it hasn't, to date, even earned back ONE THIRD of its $44 million budget - WORLDWIDE.

Heaven's Gate is not a good Western, not a good character study, not a good art film - heck, it's not even good nihilism. So, what is it?

If nothing else, Heaven's Gate serves as an example of what doom can be served by one man's hubris. And that in itself is a good lesson to learn, if painful to watch.