`What one loves in life are the things that fade
' runs the tagline to Heaven's Gate. One can hardly imagine that Michael Cimino; director of the multi Oscar winning The Deer Hunter, loved his career after 1980, because it faded pretty quickly after this monumental flop. Heaven's Gate was an industrial joke, costing anywhere from $35 to $50 million from an original $7.5 million, was lambasted by the critics, made back just $2 million and sunk the United Artists studio. Naturally, it's not that bad. The critical panning was quite uncalled for, but it's still a failure, made worst by the frequent flashes of isolated brilliance that indicate that somewhere in this shapeless slug of a film, there was a slice of cinematic brilliance trying to get out.
`Now why do we do anything?' Kristofferson asks at one point in the film. Cimino would have been wise to ask himself that same question, because at the end of the day, Heaven's Gate simply lacks all motivation behind both plot and characters to work satisfactorily as a whole. There's actually nothing in it that would make you cringe in disbelief. It starts well, with Kristofferson and Hurt graduating from Harvard in 1870, sniffing the promise that the future holds. 20 years later, both men are living in Wyoming; Hurt as a drunken member of the Stock Growers' Association and Kristofferson as a Johnson County Marshall (although that doesn't become apparent until hour in), who sort-of tries to help the Wyoming immigrants who are under threat from the Association. This could have been a brilliant study of the greed and ruthlessness that built the West, but instead Cimino foolishly concentrates on relatively minor details, only occasionally expanding on the story. Thus he digresses into a love triangle sub-plot between Kristofferson, prostitute Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert) and gun fighter Walken, padding out the film with irrelevant scenes and incidents that slow it down without either the plot nor characters developing at all. Who are these people? Why are they doing what they are doing? Why is Hurt now a drunkard and why does he stick with the ranchers if he opposes them? Why is Kristofferson only half-heartedly helping the immigrants? Instead of explanations we get a series of authentic scenes and incidents, without anything at all happening: a roller-skating sequence, a cock fight, endless crowd scenes and the immigrants debating about what to do about the rancher's in their native tongues, so we cannot tell what on earth is going. As many critics have said, it's all too much and not enough. And when the final shootout comes, it's so immersed in smoke, dust and poor editing, that we can't see who is shooting whom.
The film is certainly very beautiful with Vilmos Zsigmond's photography, David Mansfield's great score plus the massive sets certainly lend the film an authentic western feel. But much of production that added millions to the budget, like the sets Cimino had torn down and rebuilt are on screen for all of 20 seconds. The performances are generally solid, (although Walken is miscast), but again because Cimino's script is so flat, the actors do little but give one-note performances. Frustratingly, Heaven's Gate has some brilliant moments, such as an immigrant woman hauling a cart along with her dead husband on top, Walken explaining to Huppert that newspaper on his cabin walls `civilises the wilderness' and the deeply ironic and tragic final scene. All of them suggested that this could have been a great film if Cimino had concentrated more on the big picture and not just the little details. For a 3-½ hour film, Heaven's Gate has an incredibly sketchy plot and characters.
However at least the full version makes some sense. After the New York press panned the film and no one turned up to the commercial release, UA pulled the film from release and cut it by an hour at Cimino's request before the rest of the world saw it. The 140 minute piece of celluloid that came out four months later simply reduced an already confusing plot to a series of scenes with little or no relevance to one another, with little of Cimino's ambition shining through. The biggest irony in all this is that the film has such a great concept and so many great moments, that it begs a remake that would correct the many wrongs of the existing film. The result would be utterly superb given the right director, though I doubt whether any producer could to ever be drugged enough to give the green light.
`Now why do we do anything?' Kristofferson asks at one point in the film. Cimino would have been wise to ask himself that same question, because at the end of the day, Heaven's Gate simply lacks all motivation behind both plot and characters to work satisfactorily as a whole. There's actually nothing in it that would make you cringe in disbelief. It starts well, with Kristofferson and Hurt graduating from Harvard in 1870, sniffing the promise that the future holds. 20 years later, both men are living in Wyoming; Hurt as a drunken member of the Stock Growers' Association and Kristofferson as a Johnson County Marshall (although that doesn't become apparent until hour in), who sort-of tries to help the Wyoming immigrants who are under threat from the Association. This could have been a brilliant study of the greed and ruthlessness that built the West, but instead Cimino foolishly concentrates on relatively minor details, only occasionally expanding on the story. Thus he digresses into a love triangle sub-plot between Kristofferson, prostitute Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert) and gun fighter Walken, padding out the film with irrelevant scenes and incidents that slow it down without either the plot nor characters developing at all. Who are these people? Why are they doing what they are doing? Why is Hurt now a drunkard and why does he stick with the ranchers if he opposes them? Why is Kristofferson only half-heartedly helping the immigrants? Instead of explanations we get a series of authentic scenes and incidents, without anything at all happening: a roller-skating sequence, a cock fight, endless crowd scenes and the immigrants debating about what to do about the rancher's in their native tongues, so we cannot tell what on earth is going. As many critics have said, it's all too much and not enough. And when the final shootout comes, it's so immersed in smoke, dust and poor editing, that we can't see who is shooting whom.
The film is certainly very beautiful with Vilmos Zsigmond's photography, David Mansfield's great score plus the massive sets certainly lend the film an authentic western feel. But much of production that added millions to the budget, like the sets Cimino had torn down and rebuilt are on screen for all of 20 seconds. The performances are generally solid, (although Walken is miscast), but again because Cimino's script is so flat, the actors do little but give one-note performances. Frustratingly, Heaven's Gate has some brilliant moments, such as an immigrant woman hauling a cart along with her dead husband on top, Walken explaining to Huppert that newspaper on his cabin walls `civilises the wilderness' and the deeply ironic and tragic final scene. All of them suggested that this could have been a great film if Cimino had concentrated more on the big picture and not just the little details. For a 3-½ hour film, Heaven's Gate has an incredibly sketchy plot and characters.
However at least the full version makes some sense. After the New York press panned the film and no one turned up to the commercial release, UA pulled the film from release and cut it by an hour at Cimino's request before the rest of the world saw it. The 140 minute piece of celluloid that came out four months later simply reduced an already confusing plot to a series of scenes with little or no relevance to one another, with little of Cimino's ambition shining through. The biggest irony in all this is that the film has such a great concept and so many great moments, that it begs a remake that would correct the many wrongs of the existing film. The result would be utterly superb given the right director, though I doubt whether any producer could to ever be drugged enough to give the green light.