[.ca] Heaven's Gate (Widescreen) (ISBN 0792843584)

From Amazon.com:
Not many movies can take credit for bringing about the demise of a movie studio--but Michael Cimino's ego-driven, overblown Western is one of them. These days, its $40 million budget would barely cover the cost of an Adam Sandler film--but in 1981, it virtually put United Artists out of business. Cimino, fresh from an Oscar for The Deer Hunter, spent months assembling this ultimately gorgeous and confusing story of the Johnson County cattle wars of 1881, with a cast that included Kris Kristofferson, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, and many more. Almost four hours in its original form, the film was cut to less than three for an abortive commercial release, then restored for video. Anyway you look at it, this is a mess better viewed as a curiosity than anything else. --Marshall Fine

Quite Possibly the Most Maligned Picture Ever Made:
When self-appointed film experts talk about the worst movies of all time, Heaven's Gate invariably enters the conversation. Until the release of Ishtar, this depiction of the Johnson County War in the late 19th Century enjoyed the dubious distinction of being the biggest box office flop of all time. In my view, however, a box office flop doesn't necessarily denote a bad movie. A bad movie is one with low production values, bad effects, and/or muddled script, like Plan 9 From Outer Space or Manos: The Hands of Fate. Heaven's Gate, though it may have been a box office flop, is actually a very good movie that got it's undeserved reputation due to director Michael Cimino's obsession with perfection. This resulted in multiple takes of scenes that most directors could have shot in one or two. Ultimately, the picture cost three or four times its original budget to make. Negative pre-release publicity from a reporter who managed to get into the film as an extra after Cimino refused to grant him an interview, and the critical shellacking that it received from the critics when released, conspired with the well reported cost overruns to doom Heaven's Gate before it was even out of the starting gate. Personally, I like this movie. And while I appreciate Cimino's insistence on period authenticity in such things as trains, costuming and sets but I have a problem reconciling it to a script that takes such artistic liberties with recorded history. The real Jim Averill was a cattle ruster who along with his wife was hanged. He was not the noble sheriff with an Ivy League background as portrayed in the film by Kris Kristofferson. Nevertheless, Heaven's Gate is a superb motion picture in many respects. The cinematography by Villnos Zsigmond is nothing short of magnificent, and the acting performances are all good, especially those of Kristofferson, John Hurt, and Christopher Walken. Although many previous reviewers have criticized the sound quality, I found nothing wrong with it. I also didn't find the plot all that hard to follow, as others claim. Perhaps they expected the movie to give them a clue without any sort of thinking on their own. Of all the complaints that have been levelled against Heaven's Gate, the only one I think that has any merit to it is that the pacing is painfully slow. That said, I don't believe it distracts significantly from the enjoyment of the movie. Incidentally, have I mentioned that David Mansfield's score (sadly, not in print) is beautiful? Sure, Heaven's Gate is considered to be a flop. But I would suggest to anyone reading this review that you watch it for yourself and decide. It's really not as bad a movie as others have led you to believe it is.

Check it out for the camerawork; there's nothing else there:
"Heaven's Gate" is one of the most beautifully photographed films ever made. Every frame seems almost antique, a dazzling combination of sunlit exteriors and naturally lit interiors with candles and oil lamps that give the film a burnish unlike any other. And there's several brillantly directed sequences that are unlike anything in any other film. A hyper-active rollerskating dance that transforms into a waltz between the romantic leads. A massive graduation dance on the lawn of Harvard (actually shot at Oxford) that is breathtaking in its scope. However, all this camerawork and virtuoso editing is wrapped around one of the dullest screenplays ever written. The story is so simple, it could have been covered in 90 minutes instead of 3 hours and 40 minutes, and most of the movie consists of long pensive silences between the actors that lack any kind of dramatic interest or narrative thrust. The movie meanders, wanders, stops dead in its tracks, only occasionally remembering to pick up the storyline and go somewhere with it. Kristofferson is utterly passive and uninteresting. The film spends its first half-hour setting up a friendship between Kristofferson and John Hurt that has no bearing or meaning to to the storyline. The love triangle aspect is contrived and dull. And the victimized immigrants in the film are so shrill, panicky, and annoying that you almost wish they'd get killed. Pictorially, the film is a masterpiece. But as a narrative film, it utterly fails on every level.....never before has so much care gone into making a film with so little substance. As you can tell, this is a very ambivelent review. I think "Heaven's Gate" is worth a viewing just for those lovely images and sequences.....pure eye candy. Just don't expect to be entertained past that level.

Better than you've heard:
Heaven's Gate has been unfairly stigmatized by the circumstances of its creation. According to a documentary aired in a TRIO channel series called FLOPS, the film was done in by Michael Cimino's ambition to create a new "Gone with the Wind." What he created, however, was an exciting, ravishingly beautiful art film whose natural audience was much, much smaller than what the studio needed to recoup its expenses. Some reviewers say that the story was confusing, but I was able to follow it and was quite gripped by it, even though the pacing was slow and it did not spell out the plot details or give obvious clues for the audience in the usual way of Hollywood movies. I thought this was rather a compliment to my intelligence. Cimino's obsessive attention to detail -- the ultimate reason for the cost overruns that killed United Artists -- really paid off for this viewer, who loved the authenticity, the sense of being drawn back into another time (although Isabelle Huppert was too modern-looking for her role). The young Christopher Walken's tender and vulnerable character may be a surprise to those used to seeing him protray ghouls. I must point out that Kris Kristofferson's Harvard classmate is played by John Hurt (of "Elephant Man"), not William Hurt.

Cimino's Hellish Disaster:
I was one of the people who went to see this movie when it first came out in New York City - if you blinked, you missed it because it was pulled after one week! That's an indication of how bad this movie really is. While I was watching the movie, I started trying to read lips because the sound was just so horrendous, you could barely hear or understand what was being said - I'm not kidding. I could hear wagon wheels turn and horses trot better than I could the actor's voices. By the end of the movie my glutimus maximus was numb - along with the expressions on the audience's faces. You could hear a pin drop in the place - then the avalanche of boos and scathing reviews started pouring down. I've never experienced anything like it before or since. The scenery and music is fantastic, everything else is truly horrendous. Cimino had over 200 hours of film which needed to be cut down to between 2 and 3 hours - it's impossible to make a cohesive, intelligent movie from such a huge amount of film - storylines get trimmed or cut completely leaving you to wonder what the heck is going on or why certain things seemed disjointed and/or untold. You're left wondering how someone who created a spectacular movie like The Deer Hunter could have become so self-absorbed that he created a disaster of enormous proportions. $40 million might not seem like much nowawdays, but in 1980, it was a heckuva lot of money. (It's equivalent to $100,000,000 today!) Such a shame that Cimino threw his career down the toilet with this movie.

A unique movie (You have been warned):
Some people might like this movie for its anti-western and realistic view of the Far West. Others might just hate or won't stand its long sequences, its 220 minutes (while Once upon a time in America by Sergio Leone is 229 minutes, and The lord of the Rings 683 minutes), or the truthful exposition of the internal conflicts between the immigrants settlers and the americans. But if you take the time to shut yourself from the press' critics, take an unbiased attitude, and let yourself get engulf by this movie, you will live an adventure; whether or not you will hate it, or love it like I did. You have been warned. And if you can't stand watching the whole movie in one ride, try watching it like a novel; take a break from time to time.