Heaven's Gate

"You can't force salvation on people Jim, it doesn't work."

Michael Cimino's Heaven Gate (1980) is Hollywood's most infamous flop. Cimino used his leverage from The Deer Hunter to produce his longtime passion project, an epic Western about the Johnson County War of 1889. With an uncontrolled budget fueled by Cimino's megalomania, it became a joke long before premiering to bad reviews and catastrophic box office.
Since its 2012 restoration, many critics argue that Heaven's Gate was an unfairly maligned masterpiece. They're wrong. Cimino's 216 minute folly is as awful now as 36 years ago, impeccably shot but intractably dull.
Harvard-educated gunslinger Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) arrives in Casper, Wyoming in the midst of a range war between business interests and European farmers. The Cattleman's Association masses 150 gunslingers to massacre the farmers. Jim vies with Nate Champion (Christopher Walken), the Cattlemen's enforcer, for the affections of Ella (Isabelle Huppert), a pretty prostitute. He also tries to reason with Billy Irvine (John Hurt), a former classmate working with the Cattlemen. Naturally, the situation culminates in bloodshed.
Heaven's Gate has enough beautiful imagery for ten movies. Cimino and photographer Vilmos Zsigmond film in Montana's Glacier National Park, providing endless beautiful backdrops to complement impeccable period recreations. Heaven's Gate doesn't lack for iconography: Nate's introduction, shooting a farmer through a sheet; a train station swarming with immigrants; wide shots illuminated by shifting clouds; a fiery farmhouse siege. If only Cimino offered more than portentous pageantry.
Cimino starts with a Harvard graduation that plays like outtakes from The Leopard. Barely mentioned again, this twenty minute passage amply summarizes Heaven's Gate's failures. There's little narrative, so we're asked to enjoy Cimino's set pieces. But it's so obviously onanistic that the effect wears thin. Square dancing on roller skates, rustic baseball games, cockfights in church basements: eventually, they're interchangeable.
At heart, Heaven's Gate is Shane by Luchino Visconti, a range war epic with a Marxist slant. Cimino treats the immigrants as a filthy, helpless mob babbling unsubtitled dialog. The villains are mustache-twirling businessmen crafting Nixonian enemies lists and spouting Reaganesque bromides about coddling criminals. The politics aren't more sophisticated than the story; engorging the scope diminishes them further.
Of course, films can work without a rich narrative. But Cimino is neither Visconti nor Sergio Leone; his characters lack mythic stature, barely discernable from the cartoon baddies and immigrant rabble. Neither the prologue nor later run-ins explain how Jim and Billy changed from Eastern swells to frontiersmen, or why they parted ways. Ella suddenly appears an hour in, her romantic dilemma unconvincingly sketched. For all his grandeur, Cimino's drama is stillborn.
After three hours of wheel-spinning, Heaven's Gate wheezes to a climax. Jim transforms from inert bystander to inspiring leader, organizing Casper's immigrants to attack the Cattlemen. This results in an epic battle whose incoherence overwhelms spectacle. Most of the action's obscured by dust and dizzying camerawork; when someone's shot, we can't tell characters from extras. Cimino fumbles even his David Lean moment, with a twist less shocking than sour.
Kris Kristofferson's stoic, dithering passivity forfeits our respect. Isabella Huppert is similarly bland. John Hurt feels egregiously miscast, while Sam Waterston plays a silent movie villain. Christopher Walken is an intriguing presence, but lacks either motivation or stature to work. Jeff Bridges and Brad Dourif give showy supporting turns. Future stars Willem Dafoe, Terry O'Quinn and Mickey Rourke have walk-ons; Joseph Cotten delivers a boring speech.
Heaven's Gate wants to be the definitive revisionist Western. But Cimino's ego botches everything; by puffing a programmer plot into an epic, Heaven's Gate collapses in self-importance. All that's left is pretty photography, elaborate sets and deep disappointment.