1980

Heaven’s Gate:

– Mercilessly ripped apart for containing so many scenes, such as the skating rink dance or the cockfighting scenes especially, that are “wasteful” and “do nothing to drive forward the plot or narrative over the nearly 4-hour runtime.” Okay… I’d like to see any critic say the exact same thing about, I don’t know, the opening party with that farting uncle in Fanny and Alexander, any pick of scenes from La Dolce Vita or Amarcord, the Sandra Milo mansion scenes in Juliet of the Spirits, the wedding dance sequence in Cimino’s own The Deer Hunter, the Japanese affair getaway in the forest in Yi Yi, the music video scene in Rio Bravo or the aimless hangout scenes in Jules and Jim or Y Tu Mama Tambien. Incredible how when Godard does this in virtually all his films it “dissects the roaming minds of the disattached modern human” but in this film it’s somehow an artistic dumpster. I’d seriously like to see a critic put the spine together to say something like that about any of those films. These people need to be reminded that a film is not about story; it is about mood and powerful imagery, and that even in these scenes important events still happen, like Kristofferson discussing the landowners’ plan to kill off all the immigrants at the cockfight with Bridges for one.

– Anyone who complains about the “terrible” color palette should be asked to look at any frame from The Godfather and compare how similar the colors are in both films.

– I’m sorry if the above got a bit too heated, but I’m just saying I absolutely love this film, it’s amazing and I actually, completely seriously think it is perfect in virtually every way you can imagine and the critics just absolutely massacred it, completely nuked it into oblivion and that is just such crap cause this is one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

– The skating rink itself is the “Heaven’s Gate” of the title and I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of critics saw that as naming the film after such an “unimportant location” and including that in the arguments for panning it; in fact it’s quite a wonderful set piece and forms the background for many of the film’s most major moments, serving as a gathering place for the local townspeople and all and more specifically the achingly beautiful shot Drake describes on Cimino’s page is at this location; fantastic wide shot right there.

– Got flak too for too many romantic side scenes between Huppert and either Kristofferson or Walken where we just kind of watch the two characters sit around in eachother’s arms for a while; the same thing really happened with The New World (another film that tries to capture the spirit of America) and Ryan’s Daughter and all 3 are masterpieces (though clearly Cimino’s and Malick’s films are far stronger than Lean’s with all due respect).

– Films that are less than 10 hours should be banned; ok I’m joking of course but I could easily have watched this for another several hours and it was already coming close to 4. I was just totally speechless by the end. This film is so grand and epic and tries to say so much during that colossal runtime and I swear to God it manages to say it all with the most profound eloquence that I’m begging for more of it. It totally flows with cinematic energy throughout which is hard to do in a film of this length as well.
Not unlike The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance there’s a town hall sequence (very American rural small town) set in Heaven’s Gate where all the townspeople get together and discuss the big hit list created by the landowners with all the names of those “anarchists” and “thieves”, meaning the immigrants, they want dead. John Ford’s film also features a scene at a town hall where the poor townsfolk discuss how to resist the wealthy landowners at the statehood convention in that film so this is Cimino sort of putting an even darker spin on Ford.

– The acoustic score is actually really nice; at first I was left wanting something a little more maximalist (I had seen William Wyler’s The Big Country, another epic Western, the day before and anyone who’s seen that film knows the score by Jerome Moross is an absolute whopper) but as the 4 hours rolled on and on I really liked its minimalism which gives counterbalance to the epic scale of the photography and the portrait of America Cimino aims to capture.

– It’s less realist than The Deer Hunter what with the opening at the steelworks (clearly a lower-class Ken Loach or Mike Leigh sort of feel) being replaced by Kristofferson’s and Hurt’s Harvard graduation and the deep urgency of the Vietnam War in the minds of audiences (mirroring WW2 in the postwar Italian films), not to mention the simply devastating depiction of the war, being replaced by a story about poor immigrants from Eastern Europe battling fabulously wealthy landowners who want to massacre them all with carte blanche from the President himself. This is not a complaint, the wild background of the story is actually something I like and it adds character to the film.

– I’m pretty certain Walken’s death scene gets paid homage to in John Marston’s death at the end of Red Dead Redemption.

– There is one flaw in the film worth mentioning – there’s one useless title card introducing us to a town, where we never get any other title cards for any other towns in the rest of the film (we do get ones to tell us about the decades-long timespan starting out in 1870 at Harvard, then 1890 in Wyoming and 1903 in Rhode Island at the end but that’s different and actually has a purpose; with this title card we’re still in the 1890 Wyoming segment), the name of the town isn’t even important for any reason, and the signpost with the town’s name is diegetically within the same shot as the non-diegetic title card making it even more useless.

– If I did have to pin another flaw on the film it would be John Hurt. He’s introduced alongside Kristofferson in the opening sequence at Harvard and then happens to be the one who informs him of the landowners’ scheme in the first place (he’s a landowner in Wyoming now himself and at the meeting where they talk about it), and after being a big part of the first hour he mostly drops off for the next 2 ½ until we find out he throws in with the landowners anyway (sort of; he just sort of drinks whiskey constantly standing in the background getting used as some kind of comic relief). It’s just a missed opportunity for an actor of his caliber.

– The lighting in the film is truly unreal – generally done with either natural light coming in through the windows or oil lamps sort of in the same way with Barry Lyndon and candles (and of course plenty of window sunlight on top of that). Countless interior scenes in the film have this beautiful sort of burnt gold hue to them like you might see in a Rembrandt van Rijn piece and clearly for many of the exterior sequences Cimino was obsessed with topping Malick’s aesthetic in Days of Heaven; just absolutely beautiful and all the natural lighting gives the film such an organic, alive feel to an extent most other films can’t reach. Vilmos Zsigmond is and always will be one of our great directors of photography and this may be his best work.

– The performances are exceptional as well. Isabelle Huppert probably shines the most of anyone actually as the landowning woman from Quebec who wears colorful clothes, loves who she wants, and is the object of everyone’s attention over the course of the film, particularly Kristofferson and Walken; she has a great scene with Walken after he asks her to marry him and they drive off (oh, those grassy landscapes they pass by in their horse and buggy…) to his log cabin and there begins a wonderful silent sequence as we alternate between closeups of the two of them completely soaked in magic hour sunlight as they speak with their eyes and faces – she is the heart and soul of the film and she may not be Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar in pure fire underneath the hood or have the fast-talking skills of the ideal of the Hawksian woman but she proves neither, nor even being an American, are requirements for the checklist to be the female center of a Western. Behind her there’s an argument probably for either Kris Kristofferson or Christopher Walken as giving the second-best performance in the film. Walken has a great opening; we’re at the house of some Russian immigrants who had been stealing cattle and we watch a shadowy figure walk up behind a tarp one of them is hiding behind and after the guy threatens him with a knife, we go boom, shotgun blast through the tarp as we see Walken on the other side before he walks off (very punny). I’m admittedly divided on how much the more sympathetic character arc he talks throughout most of the rest of his screentime (we do get a lot of time to experience it though which is very nice) works considering the violent, Lee Marvin in Point Blank / Anton Chigurh-esque introduction he gets and I feel pretty good that he is definitely stronger in The Deer Hunter but still this is a great opportunity for him to show off, especially in the big scene where the landowners besiege his house after he splits with them (he starts out working for them and gets increasingly disillusioned with their actions over the course of the runtime) but I still think he executes a riveting performance as the tertiary component of the love triangle at the film’s center. Kristofferson is the other arguable candidate for the second-best performance and perhaps you could even make an argument for his being #1 as I think about his work in the film to write this note here. His portrayal of the traditional Western hero character is a far cry from the giant screen presence macho men made prominent by the likes of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood; he’s closer to that sort of intersection between the external hardened masculinity of a Jean Gabin (who could be sensitive himself absolutely) and the softer internal sensitivity you would see in the early method actors like Montgomery Clift or Marlon Brando that was perhaps best encapsulated by the screen persona of Robert Mitchum in all the actors that ever made the cinema great, and I’m not saying Kristofferson is at the level of any of the actors I just mentioned, because he isn’t, but that’s the archetype he exemplifies here and he does a strong job of being the film’s closest thing to a leading man, even if I do think I’d probably have to say Robert De Niro gives the best single performance in a Cimino film in The Deer Hunter. Maybe I’m underrating him a little actually since whenever I think of his work here I can’t think of anything negative to say about him, he comes off really strong here especially in the ending in Rhode Island in 1903 where he doesn’t say anything and acts entirely with his body movement and that handsome face of his that exposes so much pain and regret and agonizing reminiscence about the failures he left behind in the past but still cannot escape.

– Another flaw, even if it far from kills the film, is that at one point Walken barges into Waterston’s tent at his mercenary camp and just blows the head off a guy who had just raped Huppert and none of the other mercenaries around the tent who would have heard it try to investigate the gun blast.

– About the Huppert rape scene, I wasn’t going to talk about it at first because of the content of it but it is wonderfully epic how Kristofferson saves her; he swings down from the roof and slits the throats of one of the mercenaries as the camera is staring out through a window obstructing the frame and then he barges in through the front door and in the same instant blasts almost everybody to pieces like the scene where Jamie Foxx kills the slave catchers in Django Unchained (with the guy in the bathtub who gets his dick blown off) and at the very end of the sequence we get almost the exact same shot as the one at the opening of Inglourious Basterds where Waltz tries to hit young Shoshanna and misses, but here with Kristofferson and the mercenary Walken killed at Waterston’s camp not long afterward.

– I actually do think Cimino was inspired by Point Blank a little; at 187 minutes when Kristofferson finally gets his act together and joins the immigrants in their fight against the landowners we get a magnificent low angle shot as he walks outside of his inn like the LAX sequence in Point Blank especially emphasizing his legs in the frame and his footsteps which pound into our ears like Marvin’s steps in the sequence I’m referring to in Boorman’s film.

– I’m not sure what it means – probably nothing to be honest and I’m just trying to find some meaning to make some sense of it – but Isabelle Huppert spends an unexpectedly large portion of her screentime without clothes.

– Most viewers and critics complain about the film being unbearably slow but I was glued to the screen for every second of the watch and I did not feel the colossal runtime at all; the same happened when I watched Once Upon a Time in America, Lawrence of Arabia, and A Brighter Summer Day (I remember watching Werckmeister Harmonies a few days after ABSD and feeling like Tarr’s film was so much longer than Yang’s even though it was 90 minutes shorter… if this comes off as me insulting Tarr I have WH as the #36 film of all-time so I don’t mean for it to appear that way but I just thought it was pretty funny how Tarr’s film felt slower to me than Yang’s despite the significant disparity in runtime).

– Finally at about 166 minutes we actually get some big battles starting off with the shootout at Walken’s cabin. It’s amazing. Waterston and his hired guns assemble all around the small cabin with only Walken and another guy in there and begin firing on it from all sides like it’s a firing range. The other guy in the house dies almost immediately but Walken is able to withstand for a while and Cimino STILL uses that burnt sandy natural light aesthetic inside the house as he tries to fight back and eventually we get some of the mercenaries pushing a burning wagon up to the house destroying it. This set piece is remarkably epic despite the small setting whilst also being distressingly claustrophobic at the same time as the fire increasingly surrounds us within the house. After this sequence at Walken’s house we get the first big battle as all the angry townspeople ride out to surround the mercenary camp in a sort of firing circle as they ride around the camp on their horses and carriages and a vicious exchange of gunfire comes to be. You best believe we’ve got quick cutting, handheld shaky cam, intense closeups alongside wide shots of the whole battlefield, loud sounds of gunfire and stampeding horses all kicking up dust enveloping the entire frame. This scene is as intense as just about any war, Western, or crime film you can think of, and while I don’t think it’s the greatest of all time I definitely think it’s one of the most epic battle scenes in any film not called Heat or The Wild Bunch.

– After regrouping following the first battle to reorganize their forces, the townspeople return to the mercenary camp for a second round Cimino somehow manages to make the final climactic fight even better than the previous one. This scene goes on for 10 minutes straight and features the townspeople hiding behind armored carts as they push increasingly closer to the wagon fort constructed by Waterston’s men, and sure enough it is shot during that magic old hour. We get harsh, claustrophobic closeups of the fighters surrounded by their fortifications and as the smoke rises it’s nearly impossible to see beyond whatever’s immediately in front of the camera. We get massive explosions from dynamite thrown both ways, widespread casualties and end up far from sweet victory. Nobody knows what to do now after allowing themselves to be debased to such a level of mass killing and the mood is perfectly set after the battle as one woman just opts to blow her brains out in front of Bridges (it’s completely muted with just the score playing into our ears) in a great little moment and the readily-apparent change in composition as the heavy cluttering of the frames preceding the fight give way to only the negative space that remains.
I do feel like I’ve talked about it before but one of the main reason this film is criticized is because of the fantastic nature of the story, about a bunch of Harvard-educated landowners battling by gun and dynamite a horde of immigrants from Eastern Europe who can hardly speak English, in Wyoming of all places. This… is actually fine. Cimino manages, despite the differing origins of all the characters, their appearances (clothing is what I mean), their accents, their social positions, and even their side of choice in this war to make them all feel, really, like Americans. There’s no overt overaccentuation of some qualities that might make them appear foreign to our eyes which connects back to The Deer Hunter with our Russian-American characters there not being defined by any particularly great connection to Russian culture – they’re Americans through and through.
I know I talked earlier about how films are not about story, and when I say that I don’t mean to imply that narrative deserves absolutely no attention in cinematic analysis, far from that but when you’re watching a film the first thing you should be considering is what you’re looking at far before “Is this a great story?” and in this case I actually do think Heaven’s Gate’s story is fine and not with too many major blemishes.. Obviously some of my favorite directors like Alain Resnais or Terrence Malick especially are famous for their manipulation of narrative as one of their directorial trademarks but I ask any one of you reading to check through Drake’s Top 50-100 directors list and think about how many of those directors you enjoy for their film’s stories more than anything else… and then get back to me.

– Largely wordless ending that reminded me a little of the opening 10 minutes of L’Eclisse. This is the ending of Bicycle Thieves, La Dolce Vita, Nostalghia, The Third Man, Werckmeister Harmonies or Rocco and His Brothers – the final shot just of Kristofferson smoking alone on the yacht is both a formal atom bomb and emotionally heartrending after all the events and all his efforts throughout the entire previous 3 ½ hours of the film.

– I’m not sure of how much more there is for me to say about this film. Obviously there is some American Revolution no taxation without representation stuff going on here with Waterston being “the representative of the US government and the President” as he proudly declares himself much alike how redcoat generals considered themselves representatives of the King in the Thirteen Colonies and there is also some criticism of like big business lobbying as the US Army generally shows up to reimburse Waterston whenever he finds himself on the back foot here. Like so many directors of his time, Cimino clearly had the ambition and self-obsession of the likes of Orson Welles with a creative mind that’s not as far off (but still not quite on that plane) as most would say and he seemed obsessed with trying to create the Great American Film with his works largely being about immigrants who have managed to integrate into American society but are still often looked down upon by figures of authority due to preconceptions about their origins, probably not too dissimilar with how Cimino felt about dealing with producers if you read just about anything about him. I don’t intend for this review to come off as endorsing his hefty expansion of the original budget projections and I think he could have made the film for less whilst still preserving the greatness but truly the fault lay with the critics who really rated the film more on the lengthy stories of Cimino’s conflicts with studio heads than any characteristics of the film itself, and while I’ll admit I haven’t seen (and don’t think I ever will) the supposedly hideous early versions of the film that were screened originally that does not absolve their miss here.

– I actually think this is a far stronger than The Deer Hunter (at present #176 of all films to me) currently which makes me feel I should revisit that film as soon as possible

– A masterpiece

In general do you think that Cathy Moriarty gives either 2nd Or 3rd best performance of the year?
I find Nicholson’s performance flawed at times so I’d say it comes down to Pesci or Moriarty as the 2nd best. I’ll go with Moriarty.