Review of Heaven's Gate (1980) by Matt B — 15 Jul 2009

Not So Much a Film as a Death March.

Before [i]Ishtar[/i], before [i]Howard the Duck[/i], there was [i]Heaven's Gate[/i]. At the time, the most famous flop in movie history. Oh, there are many others before it; there will be many others to come. But [i]Heaven's Gate[/i] holds a special place in Hollywood history. For one, it's got at least one thing on those first two, and that's about two hours. Rumour has it that the original cut that director Michael Cimino provided to the studio was over five and a half hours. Now, first off, who writes a script that long? I mean, okay, lots of people. But who knows the industry and thinks, "Hey, I can do a five and a half hour film! America's ready for that." Only it turns out no. No, America wasn't. America won't be any time soon. The theatrical release was only about two and a half hours. It did not do well in the theatres or with the critics. Now available is the over three and a half hour version. It is very long. For one thing, it shows that Cimino has no real filter. He thinks it looks cool, so there it goes onscreen.

What I keep coming back to is a quote from the [i]Amazing Colossal Episode Guide[/i] to [i]Mystery Science Theater 3000[/i]. "A lot of stuff happens, but nevertheless, this is a boldly plotless movie." We start in what we will pretend is Harvard and totally not Oxford. There is a graduation ceremony. I don't know why. (I don't know why the epilogue is there, either. We move on.) And then Kris Kristofferson is a small-town sheriff in middle-of-nowhere Wyoming. His community is largely immigrant, and apparently, they live on rustling from the local cattle barons. There's even a whorehouse that accepts cattle instead of money. (I hope you get a [i]lot[/i] of credit for that cow!) The cattle barons put out a kill list of practically everyone in the county, with Christopher Walken as their lead hitman. Because everyone knows Christopher Walken is evil, so that's great. Sam Waterston is also evil. Evil for all. And they kill a lot of immigrants.

The immigrant-killing scene is the one that really comes to mind for me in "oh, my Gods, this goes on too long!" I don't know how long it actually is. It feels like about an hour. Rumour (there's a lot of rumour about this movie) has it that that in the original cut of this film, this part of it was as long as a movie all by itself. Once again, I really want to know why he thought people would sit there for this. Much discussion is had about the money aspects of the film, and Cimino wasted a lot of money. There are all kinds of stories, though how many of those are true is kind of up for grabs. At any rate, it is simply true that the filming itself wasted money. It did. Apparently, Cimino shot about a million and a half feet of film. Assuming he used 35 millimeter, a fairly safe assumption, that's about 2777 hours of film, if I've done the math right. Now, of course, every filmmaker shoots more film than they're planning to use. Of course! For one thing, there's wide angles and closeups. Unless you're Ed Wood, you're going to shoot more than you're going to use. But that's about a thousand hours of film shot for every hour shown in the theatre.

Is it a good movie other than that? Meh. It's beautiful, certainly. Whatever else you want to say about the film or the man, hey, it's a beautiful film. Whatever other failings he had, Cimino did choose a great location. (Though apparently there was an equally great but cheaper one he didn't use.) I'm not terribly jazzed about the dialogue, as I said, and I had a hard time keeping track of who any of these people were or what they were doing. Or, in fact, caring. I could just sit and watch the lovely scenery, except when they were in gloomy interiors or full of corpses or whatever. The great sweep of the scenery, beautifully filmed, is a selling point for a lot of the middle of the movie. I just don't really think Cimino has much of a feel for people. [i]The Deer Hunter[/i], his previous film, was good, but I still felt kind of distant.

For what I think are obvious reasons, this was the real end of Cimino's career. He's directed a total of eight movies. The next one was five years after [i]Heaven's Gate[/i]. His check was cashed, basically. Unfortunately, he kind of ruined it for everyone else. There is a limit to how much free rein they're willing to let you have. Even the most successful of directors still have to make an awful lot of potboilers to make what they really want to. It doesn't matter how successful you are most of the time; there's only so many flops they'll let you have the money to make. Now, of course, Hollywood is a business. I do get that. I also firmly believe it's our own fault that a lot of the crap in theatres gets made, because we don't go see the good stuff. How many of you saw [i]Frost/Nixon[/i] in the theatre? A friend of mine said he wasn't going to bother, because it was two people in a room talking. Which is, of course, true. But if we don't go see it, and if we don't go see the better [i]Heaven's Gate[/i]s out there (you know, better than the actual), they're not going to keep making them.