I haven’t done this in a while. You know, just watch and review an older movie in the middle of the week. I just haven’t had the time. So, naturally, I decided to watch a three and a half hour movie, a box office and critical bomb on release, that supposedly bankrupted the studio that made it, ruined the writer/director’s career, ended the auteur era where studios let young directors do their own thing without too much interference, and maybe even put a real hit on the Western genre. OK, the Western genre was probably dying by then anyway, and it has gotten better since then, but the rest? Yeah, it looks like that all happened.
Then again, I went with the longer cut on The Criterion Channel that has been subject to critical reappraisal in more recent years.
Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) is seen as the movie opens running to his graduation ceremony in Harvard Yard. It’s 1870, and the first twenty minutes or so covers that ceremony, from Joseph Cotten’s Reverend Doctor opening the ceremony with a speech on responsibilities and the like to Averill’s pal Billy Irvine (John Hurt)’s giving a humorous address to the crowd as the distinguished speaker. There are rites of passage, dances, and Jim’s flirting with a girlfriend (Rosie Vela) who will disappear from the movie until the end of the film as this sequence then cuts ahead twenty years to show the older Averill, now a U.S. Marshall, rolling into a remote part of Wyoming and eventually getting involved in a land dispute with poor, Eastern European immigrant farmers on one side and rich, cattle barons on the other side.
Oh, and along the way, he has a romance brewing with Isabelle Hubert’s Ella, a brothel owner who offers her girls in exchange for either cash or (often stolen) cows. But she likewise has attracted the attention of gunman Nate Champion (Christopher Walken), a friend of Averill’s. That said, the two never really come to blows over her. That’s not what this movie is about. It’s about something else, as the cattle barons use their money and influence to put the law on their side and set out to murder 125 of the immigrants by branding them as criminals of one sort or another. Averill won’t stand for that as it is blatant murder. Can he help the immigrants achieve the American dream?
I went into this knowing it was long and that Cimino’s movie was considered a bit self-indulgent. I can see that. It is long, it has moments where the movie seems intent to just admire the background, and the action scenes one might expect from the genre are largely not there until near the end of the movie. There aren’t any bad performances, but there aren’t any that really stand out either. The movie is focused more on characters and their struggles. This is a movie that has numerous character actors that, in any other Western, would be recognizable as certain character types, but here are not those sorts of characters, possibly because the actors are early in their careers, but seeing the likes of Jeff Bridges, Brad Dourif, and Terry O’Quinn here as very different sorts of characters.
Except, that description could very much describe Cimino’s arguable masterpiece, The Deer Hunter. Heaven’s Gate is a longer movie by a bit over a half-hour, and Kristofferson is no Robert De Niro, but the things that worked in The Deer Hunter are also present in Heaven’s Gate. What happened here? Heaven’s Gate is better than its reputation, but it didn’t hold me the same way that The Deer Hunter did. I think the issue here is The Deer Hunter is about the effects of war on three men while Heaven’s Gate is more about how people react to an upcoming war of sorts. How Averill feels at the end of the movie after everything happens is a bit hard to measure, and that worked against the movie’s favor for me.
That said, seeing Sam Waterson, the face of paternal legal justice in years’ worth of Law & Order, as the face of evil is kinda weird.
Grade: B-
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