Lately I’ve been watching the “director’s cut” of the movie Heaven’s Gate, the 1980 epic that
supposedly bankrupted a studio and effectively ended the career of director
Michael Cimino. I saw at a theater the original
release of a truncated version, which bombed on debut. The longer cut is a much better film that perhaps
deserves more appreciation.
The film has two story lines: the larger is the conflict between powerful Wyoming
cattle ranchers and the poor Eastern European immigrants who are spilling onto grazing
land, and the smaller is the love triangle involving a brothel madam (Isabelle
Huppert) and her two lovers, the local lawman named Averill (Kris Kristofferson)
and the enforcer for the cattlemen named Champion (Christopher Walken).
The film’s structure is in three parts: a main narrative set over a short period of
time in Wyoming bookended by a long 20 minute prologue of the Harvard class of
1870’s graduation ceremonies and a short epilogue set back east in
Newport. The main character is Averill, one
of the Harvard graduates who years later is the county lawman duty-bound to
protect the immigrants but who seems at times wearily resigned to the
inevitability of their oppression by the powerful and violence-prone ranchers. Billy (John Hurt), classmate and friend of
Averill, speaks at the graduation ceremony and concludes that society is “well
arranged”, contravening the main graduation speaker who encouraged the men to
make the world a better place. Twenty
years later they both are out West, where society is definitely not “well
arranged”, although Averill is trying to make it more so.
The film has problems, to be sure. The uneven narrative meanders, lingering here
and there with poignant “slice of life” segments such as a rousing roller
skating scene and the graduation segment.
Poor sound quality and mumbled dialog (this could almost be an Altman
movie) makes the narrative frustratingly hard to decipher in places. Nevertheless, the movie is captivating,
surprisingly so since the plot in many ways is so mundane. It’s beautifully filmed in many parts, especially
those showing the hardscrabble lives of the immigrant poor, their perseverance
and resilience in the face of great hardship, and their exuberance and emotionalism
as well. Perhaps the movie works best as
a collection of slice-of-life portraits, which somehow taken together amount to
more than the whole.
“Heaven’s Gate”, incidentally, is the name of the roller skating
rink in the immigrant-dominated town of Sweetwater which proudly proclaims in writing to offer a “moral and exhilarating experience”. The film reminds me of another revisionist Western
with a story similarly of growing intensity, explosive violence, and haunting music -- Sergio
Leone’s 1968 film Once Upon a Time in the West, which itself incorporated many
references to earlier Westerns and whose story revolves around a railroad baron’s
ruthless ways that eventually lead to his ruin at a crucial piece of land
named, perhaps only coincidentally, Sweetwater.
R Balsamo
