Heaven's Gate (1980)

It's almost impossible to talk about Heaven's Gate the movie without getting into Heavens Gate the fiasco. Michael Cimino's western flop of epic proportions was so bloated and over budget that it derailed Cimino's promising career (just one year earlier he won a slew of Oscars for The Deer Hunter), bankrupted United Artists Studio (who had produced some of the finest films in history, (The Night of the Hunter, Some Like it Hot, Midnight Cowboy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rocky and Raging Bull to name only a small few), and basically forced studios to take control of a film's production away from it's directors from that point forward. The production of Heaven's Gate is well documented in the book and documentary Final Cut. I haven't read the book but the documentary is available in eight parts on Youtube. It runs about seventy minutes and is a great accompany piece (and actually more interesting than Heaven's Gate) to the film.

But what to make of the film itself. When Heaven's Gate was released the reviews were scathing. Some labeled it as the worst movie in history and to my knowledge there was only one positive review written at the time. A quick plot summary reveals that Heaven's Gate is a fictionalized account of the Johnson County War starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges, Isabelle Huppert, John Hurt, Brad Douriff and Sam Waterston with smaller roles played by now familiar faces such as Mickey Rourke and Terry O'Quinn (John Locke!). Kristofferson is the sheriff of Johnson county who gets involved in a love triangle with Walken and Huppert's characters, while at the same time trying to keep a group of wealthy land owners led by Hurt and Waterston from murdering a large group of immigrants (Bridges, Douriff). 

After watching it for the first time, I think it's safe to say that most critics were too caught up in the hype surrounding the troubled production to appreciate some of the many positives Heaven's Gate has to offer. For starters, the film is absolutely beautiful to look at. Even though the version I watched featured some pretty terrible video quality, it was impossible to not marvel at the shots that Cimino and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond put together throughout the entire three and half hour run time. Cimino's attention to detail is quite legendary and for the purpose of the overall visuals, it served the movie very, very well. The musical score by David Mansfield is excellent as well and is a key component is keeping the tone consistent throughout the movie. Almost all the performances are of a high quality with Hurt's supporting role being a highlight. For the most part, when taken on their own, individual scenes are excellent. The violent portions of the movie specifically are very well done and exciting, though at times it's difficult to tell what exactly is happening.

Even with all the positive aspects of Heaven's Gate it's also easy to see why the movie was such a horrible failure. For starters there's the runtime. There's at most two hours worth of story here and it's stretched out for at least an extra hour and a half. I generally hate when people complain about a movie being slow since it usually means that they're not paying attention to other aspects of the film but in this case there's no denying that the movie crawls along at a snail's pace. There's also no one who (at the time) was a bona fide movie star and box office draw. Though Bridges and Walken were both well regarded actors (Bridges was nominated for a couple Oscars and Walken had won one), at that point in their careers, they were not reasons to see a film like some (or a lot of) people would consider them today. Huppert was making her English film debut and it shows. She's a fine actress and does a good job but her French accent is very heavy and can be hard to understand (I suppose this could just be the audio track as well). The fact that the movie is about a violent and negative point in American History could not have possibly helped either. Though I'm sure the script plays loose with the facts, the U.S. Gov't does not come off positive at all and in the early Reagan era that wasn't nearly as accepted in films as it was a few years earlier or would be today.

Overall Heaven's Gate is nowhere near the disaster it's reputation suggests. There are numerous positive aspects to the film. Unfortunately the negatives will still outweigh the positives for most people. If you're interested in film history, this is a movie that you must see at least one time in your life. I would definitely not recommend it to the average moviegoer though. It's just way too bloated and self-indulgent to hold most people's interest for three and a half hours.

Rating: 2.5/5