Movie: Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)
It begins with a long, detailed depiction of ritual communality. James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and Billy Irvine (John Hurt) excitedly join the marching band accompanying their fellow Harvard graduates to Commencement. They arrive at the ceremony to the tune of the abolitionist Battle Hymn of the Republic, honored appropriately by a welcoming speech on the connections between education, civilisation and progress. It doesn't take long for class orator and jester Billy to undercut those hefty words, to the amusement of his friends. They are anyway more interested in the second part of the day, reserved for waltzes with girls and manly brawls approved by tradition, a reminder that war heroes, political leaders and other great men of history most often start off as regular Joes with the same base desires and ordinary interests as the rest of us. Before you know it, it's 20 years later and James is a sheriff in Johnson County, Wyoming, tasked with protecting immigrants from a group of rich white ranchers, led by Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) who feel threatened have set up a death list of 125 supposedly criminal aliens. Billy is reluctantly on Frank's crew, but is mostly drunk and despite his half-hearted moral lamentations never breaks rank.
The Deer Hunter should earn you a lifetime blank check and though the opening of Heaven's Gate can never reach its heights, it does rather promisingly follow its blueprint. Besides, I am sympathetic to stories about how anti-immigrant populism threatens the universalist cosmopolitan values of the world we graduated in, and to artists sticking it to studio shareholders. Alas, the film goes quickly downhill after its introductory scenes, at some points becoming even worse than its reputation suggests. Some of that could be attributed to studio interference. Cimino originally handed in a version that was over five hours long, and was forced to cut it down to 3,5 hours. Many scenes feel unfinished, seem to lack context or end unnaturally, but what is in there is at times so hollow and so misguidedly written, directed and performed it's hard to imagine they would be salvaged by their full form. The romantic triangle between James, Ella (Isabelle Huppert) and Champion (Christopher Walken) is an especially inexplicable disappointment.
Few films I've seen have such a humane and intimate understanding of their characters as The Deer Hunter and then Heaven's Gate's presents Huppert as an infantilised floozy who can't choose between two grandiosely pensive men. The film spends so much time filming Jim looking thoughtfully in the distance it forgets to give him an actual personality, or any urgency. As a result, the film also fails to coherently make its political points come across. The immigrants may not be criminals, but they are essentially all drunk dumb damsels in distress needing a real American to save, and think for, them. In addition, Cimino blew his budget and delayed filming for months to create sets that would meticulously recreate 1890's Johnson County, going so far to make sure that the distance between houses was correct, to then turn Ella into a prostitute, a proven historic lie perpetrated by the rich cattle ranchers the film seeks to present as a symbol of America's supposedly hypocritic promises of progress.
Still, I enjoyed the staging of many of the heated discussion among the immigrants, with people on all sides of the screen yelling in Serbian, Czech, Polish, German and broken English and still understanding each other because of their familiarity. I also liked that Cimino continued his approach to filming violence from The Deer Hunter. It's brutal, sudden and jarring, and completely alien to the tranquillity and ordinariness of daily life. That doesn't mean that it can't be used for cinematic excitement. By the end of the film Cimino has finally found an image, of a gun-wielding stylishly dressed Huppert, approaching on horseback, that breathes some life into the proceedings and keeps returning to it as the immigrants encircle their attackers, knowing full well that it most likely will be futile.
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