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2. Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)
Perhaps a few of the titles below are better Westerns. Yet, what is undeniable is that I'm passionate about Cimino's tarnished masterpiece in a way none of those films can invoke. I've spent so many times defending and fighting for this film that it's difficult to keep perspective on it. Yet, one things is for certain: it comes as close to a perfect film as anything I've ever seen. Yes, it's an Anti-Western: it turns the Johnson County War into an allegory for America's own hidden class warfare; instead of a mythic self-contained West, it traces the way the Western frontier was not a clean break from history, but the complete product of the East, of Harvard elites and European immigrants. The circle - Cimino's privileged symbol of society and community, inclusive for those within it, sealed-off to those that stand outside it - dominates the film. It's stands, formal and highly ritualized, in the Harvard opening, around the Liberty Tree, its deep ancient roots corresponding to those of the American Aristocracy. It pops up later in Heaven's Gate, joyful and frenzied, around a iron stove, a symbol of the new industrial melting-pot America. At the end, we stand back as these two circles try to devour and destroy themselves, a final battle, the parody of the "flower run" at Harvard turned bloody real, situated around another tree, small, young and growing: it's a fight for the future of the country.

But Cimino's film isn't just this sort of grand allegorizing, nor is it simply Western demystification. The entire films is touched with a deep sense of disillusionment, regret and yearning for the lost West. Jim Averill wants to believe in the Mythic West, he wants to make a clean break from Eastern society, to refashion himself as an autonomous man of the frontier; he sees in Johnson County an opportunity for a classless utopia free from the foibles of the past. Yet, Kris Kristofferson's aged visage constantly registers disappointment at the reality of the West. This is a film in which the "good gone days" are constantly invoked. We jump forward twenty years from Harvard, and find Averill waking up, as if a dreaming of a past he can't escape. When the film ends, we find him on a boat looking off into the sea in deep mediation, haunted by past events that can't be changed. John Hurt's Billy Irvine drunkenly stares through a stain-glass window, at two women in a garden, and there is no doubt that for a moment he's been transported back to his Harvard days. Chris Walken's Nate Champion drifts off to sleep in mid-conversation, and it's like he's gone to some personal place in his own lost past. It is only the immigrants who are constantly looking forward, with Isabelle Huppert shrewd businesswoman, with a dream of settling down, the most persisent. But it is ultimately the inescapable pull of the past - of Eastern surveyors and capitalists hoping to preserve the status quo; of a community slowly recreating the system of class that they hoped to escape - that engulfs Sweetwater.

Critics called the film formless, but it has a very precise, bilateral structure, building on the contrasting structure he used in The Deer Hunter. The aforementioned circles frame the film, and divide it into two sections. The first half establishes Sweetwater, already showing signs of infighting and threat of invasion, but still filled with incredible promise. The second half, revisiting the same locales, shows the way those tensions undo the town and community. The Eastern bookends, instead of being gratuitous, likewise places the film in its proper context. It begins in 1870, the year after the completion of the Transcontintal Railroad, which opened the West to a flood of Eastern settlers and industry, beginning the last chapter of the Wild West. By the time we return to the East for the epilogue, it is 1903: the west has ended, and we finish in Newport, the palatial boomtown, the symbol of the Gilded Age, which emerged practically overnight, and whose grandeur and wealth came largely from the closing of the West. The bulk of the story, taking place in the middle of this 30 year period, represents the final last gasps of the Western frontier.

Standing in the middle of this film is the dance at the Heaven's Gate town hall, the centerpiece of the film, one of the most joyous musical moments in all the cinema. Critics loved being snide about this scene, and the seemingly arbitrary choice to name the film after it. But it's not a wasteful scene or a meanignless choice of title: it's the key to understanding the film. For one brief moment, the dream of Sweetwater seems possible, attainable, real. The key shot in this scene is, likewise, pegged as a gaffe by many of the film's detractor. Jeff Bridges, drunken and nauseous, exits the hall. When he steps outside, the shot is suddenly drowned out in a brown-tint. Such an unnatural and intense visual, in a film that's otherwise concerned with capturing the natural beauty of the landscape, hits you square in the face. But it's no mistake: in exiting the hall and vomiting, Bridges exposes the delicacy of the moment, an illusion that can easily be broken. Drowned in sepia, the shot resembles a photograph that is threatening to fade away; and in the second half of the film, that is precisely what happens. Like the proverbial "camel in a needle's eye", the future of this promised land leads to a bloody, desperate scramble. Cimino isn't out to destroy or subvert the Western Myth, like Peckinpah or Leone. He desperately, like Averill, wants to believe in it. The film's real power comes in its heartbreaking vision of a mythic West that never was, but could have been. When we find Averill at the end off the shore of Rhode Island, the beautiful landscapes of Montana replaced by the amorphousness of the sea, a man without a country, we understand what was lost at Heaven's Gate.

Perkins Cobb wrote:And also true regarding Heaven's Gate. I heard a funny story about how Cimino played nice with the Criterion people at first, then finally unloaded on some underling there with a screaming hissy fit, thereby convincing Becker et. al. that he was basically a jerk.

Perkins Cobb wrote:I heard a funny story about how Cimino played nice with the Criterion people at first, then finally unloaded on some underling there with a screaming hissy fit, thereby convincing Becker et. al. that he was basically a jerk.

cdnchris wrote:I almost have a feeling the piece on the Johnson County War (almost typed "Howard Johnson War") was dropped because Cimino felt it took away from his film or that he somehow feels his film is the ultimate authority on the subject

Jeff wrote:I wonder if they knew the extent to which (it seems) Cimino would sabotage this release, they would have invested the tremendous amount of time and money that they did. It does indeed seem like a real missed opportunity.

Cold Bishop wrote:I'm probably Cimino's biggest booster, but he's a guy whom you can't, absolutely under any circumstance, allow to be contractually in charge. I don't know if this was a case of Criterion unwisely pursuing the "Director's Approval" signature, or if they truly felt they couldn't conduct a proper restoration without him (I'm sure they could have tapped Zsigmond, who's long defended the film... that is if Cimino didn't burn that bridge with his rant against cinematographers a while back), but it's a mistake.

You put yourself in charge, you try to be a benevolent dictator, try to simply keep him from slitting his own throat, and he will buckle and rise to the occasion. If Criterion was a little wiser, a little more clever, I'm sure they could have got his participation without kowtowing. But alas...