Review of Heaven's Gate (1980) by Max O — 29 Mar 2009

I saw this movie with an open mind. I really wanted to like it. I wanted to say that after all the trash-talking about it, all the word that it was one of the greatest disasters in film history, and all the careers destroyed by it, that it was severely underrated. I wanted to hail Michael Cimino, the director of the brilliant "The Deer Hunter". I wanted to praise the performances. I cannot do any of that, because I'm not reviewing the movie I wanted to review. I'm reviewing Heaven's Gate.

What can be said about this movie? The whole thing defies belief. It's hard to believe that Cimino would put in footage that rendered the majority of the dialogue totally inaudible. It's hard to believe that Cimino would bring in characters and have us spend so much time with them without actually getting to know much of anything about them. It's hard to believe that so many scenes that add nothing would be left in. It's hard to believe that characters that we have spent time with would be taken away in the blink of an eye without giving us any time to realize what just happened or having any good reason to kill them off. But that's what this movie delivers.

I'd like to praise Cimino, but I can't- he's given a bloated, incomprehensible disaster that ended New Hollywood. I want to praise the performances, but there's so little dialogue or anything else that I could make head or foot of that most of them are lost in the shuffle. Christopher Walken and Brad Dourif stand out in a good way, but I can't hear Kristofferson, I don't care about Huppert, and John Hurt is just rambling. This movie is inexcusable. It's not from a lack of focus, but of too much focus on the wrong things. Maybe the shorter version is better. Maybe the 5 1/2 hour version that we'll never see is better. I can't say, and I'll probably never be able to. I'm reviewing this, and this movie sucks.