Post by ronnierocketago on Mar 2, 2009 8:13:49 GMT
HEAVEN'S GATE (1980) - ***1/2
"We all wanted to be the next David Lean, and we all failed." - Brian DePalma
That quote was DePalma's description of his fellow famed filmmaker Bratswho effectively ran Hollywood in the 1970s. Yet intentionally or not, it's most suited for Michael Cimino who in two films went from an Oscar-winning director of the popular classic THE DEER HUNTER to the blackballed poster-child of cinematic egotism in HEAVEN'S GATE.
I won't repeat the well-rehearsed story about that infamous production, for you can easily google all that up. I think the best GATE anecdote is from Director of Photography Vilmos Zsigmond, who recounted how a whole day of shooting was wasted so to get the perfect shot, ruined by an overcast. The crew waited and waited, until it's 4 PM and lunch hadn't even been served yet. Zsigmond nerves up and asks Cimino about this delay, and he yells: "This is bigger than lunch!"[/i]
So yes alot of that was Cimino's fault, but his costly shenanigans were in retrospect incredibly on par for that studio epoch when directors apparently got the keys to the bank, and used them well. I'm talking Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW, Martin Scorsese's NEW YORK, NEW YORK and RAGING BULL, Steven Spielberg's 1941, William Friedkin's SORCERER, and Warren Beatty's REDS. All those projects for better or for worse were guys basically getting to do whatever the fuck they wanted. Consider that Zsigmond was also DP on REDS and APOCALYPSE NOW. Hell actor Mickey Rourke made his film debut in 1941 and his next movie after that? HEAVEN'S GATE. A coincidence? Yes.
So why is GATE singled out in Hollywood infamy?
The easy answer would be that for the most expensive picture of its time, HEAVEN'S GATE practically lost almost its entire $44 million investment. OK that's a good reason, but so did the Unification Church-funded Korean War drama flop INCHON, yet nobody ever mentions that. The other facet is the myth that it bankrupted the studio United Artists, which btw is bullshit, since its parent corporation Transamerica wrote off that budget and regained it all within a trading day at the stock market. But it was from the sheer embarrassing public humiliation of that defeat why UA was sold off, like how Blockbuster famously years ago passed up a chance to buy then-struggling Netflix because they were developing their own Internet downloading service with Enron, but then Enron went bankrupt, and that project floundered about $600 million. Shit, GATE is milk money compared to that.
Have you noticed a pattern? I've been talking about GATE, everything but the film itself. It's that aura and mystique of shame and failure that quite frankly intimidated me from reviewing GATE for years. I mean one of the supposed worst movies ever made, all 219 minutes? Fuck that. But 2 years ago, I decided finally to grow a pair. Whenever I review by DVD on my big screen television, I get a notepad which I then pen down thoughts and criticisms so you know I won't forget them for the actual review. The other ritual of mine is that I never stop the film when I'm viewing. Yes maybe a pause or two for the toilet, but I'm not many folks who simply stop a picture mid-stream and continue it another day. Cinema has an energy, a continuous momentum punch that I usually think can't resume or sustain if you piecemeal it.
Maybe that was was my problem, why it took me that long to finally write this review, for afterwards I was damn numb emotionally and intellectually for I couldn't decide if I absolutely loved HEAVEN'S GATE, or absolutely fucking hated it. While it pisses me off with it's lethargic self-admiring pace, such that it tests the patience of everyone, hell probably even make Sergio Leone and David Lean squirm in their seats, I'm simultaneously stunned by Zsigmond's cinematography. Not only should it have won the Oscar that year, it's also one of the best shot films I've ever seen. It tells Sir Ridley Scott to go piss off. Hell even GATE's most ardent detractors admit it did good there:
Another good example, but sadly I haven't found a YouTube clip, is this long sequence at the train station in town where without cuts Cimino follows this train conductor from his cramp barely-lit interiors to outside the door, revealing to us a huge unbelievablely bright landscape of the town and railroad (w/ functioning train) all built from scratch. Considering this was back before computers, this is stunning triumphant production design and even more impressive (and did get a worthy Oscar nomination for that.) For that one terrific shot at least, the fortune was worth it.
The story is lacking, but I expected as much from anyone that tries to emulate Lean and Leone, where the script is merely a vehicle for harmonic larger-than-life visual poetry. But the difference is that unlike masterpieces like say LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, Cimino's GATE suffers mostly from is because of how goddamn redundant the plotting is. I believe it was Zsigmond who remarked that Cimino's problem on GATE was that "He fell in love with his movie."
You have the opening 20 minute(!) prologue at Harvard in 1870, all to show thematically how graduate Kris Kristofferson at youth was very optimistic and ambitious, looking towards the west hopefully as the future in pure American Transcendentalistm spirit. Yet is all that necessary to make that point? I mean a bitter line shared later in 1890s Wyoming between him and fellow classmate John Hurt was as effective in dealing with bright idealism fighting with gritty reality. That said, I did dig that whole graduation co-ed dancing sequence, reflecting a rare social occassion in Victorian times when the sexes could openly express their love and sexuality. A nice nuanced touch.
Anyway, the rest of the movie is Ivy League aristocrat-turned-cowboy Kristofferson (doing his best Theodore Roosevelt) defending Eastern European immigrant farmers from a mercenary army of assassins hired by wealthy greedy landowners (led by Sam Waterson), with a death list unofficially sanctioned by the Federal government. Kristofferson also is trapped in the Classic American Romance Triangle, between his foreign prostitute (Isabelle Huppert) and a bounty hunter (Christopher Walken). GATE was based off a real historical conflict in the Johnson County War, though unlike the movie, the U.S. Army actually arrested the cattlemen for contracting the killers and didn't save them at the last minute from the homesteaders defending themselves.
Which is interesting, considering alot of GATE's budget got blown from Cimino wanting to be very meticulous with the historical accuracy of that time period from props, costumes, sets, music, dancing, everything but his screenplay. So GATE was like Cimino's ambitious mixed bag of MCCABE & MRS. MILLER meeting GONE WITH THE WIND. He did include a detail which I never knew beforehand, which was that apparently alot of these farming community actually had... wait for it....roller skating rinks. This begs the question, why haven't we gotten a western shoot-out involving a rink yet?
What is lost within the long pauses and wide shots is that there is actually some good acting going on here, which you would expect from a cast that also includes Jeff Bridges, Brad Dourif, and Rourke. Yeah Huppert's thick French tongue is scrambled for me at times, but I get the idea behind Cimino's casting: Sweet immigrant whore with the expected rough English, and plus she has nice tits. Kristofferson may seem out of place, but he's going for a rich boy-roughnecking Theodore Roosevelt here, so it works. Also take that scene when Walken busts into Waterson's tent and shoots his lackey right between the eyes, and of course that baddie is rattled. But after a moment or two, he straightens up and firmly acts as if nobody's brains had been blown across his table, and warns Walken to screw off. GATE features an underrated strong physically charismatic performance from Walken, typecasted back even then as the creepy violent psychopath. Notice too how Waterson sports a Hitler-esque mustache as the genocidal WASP.
If GATE is remembered in America as one of the most important films in Hollywood history (for all the wrong reasons), in Europe and Japan it's critically highly considered a classic, even a masterpiece by some. I think this vast difference between the oceans is explained away by the very reason why GATE pissed me off and so many others in the first place. It's a surprisingly bitter melancholic narrative, as if Cimino wanted to make an anti-western, where the dynamic badass intelligent gun-slinging individuals don't prevail and in fact are trampled by society in large, where the industrialists stomp on the little people and get away with it.
A would-be American tragedy, you could say where Kristofferson wanted to escape the Eastern establishment to out west find his own fortune and love, only to be beaten and driven back East and as an old man compromised by settling down into a marraige within his social class. GATE was in fact accused back in the day for being Marxist or a "Red Western,"[/b] an ironic criticism considering GATE's price tag.
In short, that message seems more receptive in collective societies, while Hollywood in 1980 had and still doesn't have such interest in a long-winded very depressing tale that can drive one to drink. Or maybe not, I don't know. All I'm saying is, put aside it's reputation and maybe give HEAVEN'S GATE a honest chance, but take a real good resting break during intermission. You'll thank me later. At best, you'll find maybe a flawed secret treasure, and at worst suffer a pretty boring historic curiosity with a good soundtrack, and see a horse actually blown up, which is why the American Humane Association has subsequently monitored the handling of all animals in film productions to this day. Thanks Michael.
I guess if I wanted ot sum it all up short and nicely (too late just like GATE), I think of the great rock band The Clash's great album SANDINISTA!, which bombed with bad buzz, and even today many devout Clash fans won't bother exploring that 3-disc opus. Yes there was much self-indulgence, but I'll kindly take the great music with the random experimental tunes and filler-reggae dubs. Not exactly a perfect analogy, but I accept ambitious-if-to-a-big-fault GATE. Warts, intestines, roller skates, cockfighting, burning cabins, exploding horsey, and all.
