My Year Of Flops Case File #81 Heaven's Gate
Steven Bach's fascinating, maddening book The Final Cut chronicles the making and unmaking of 1980's Heaven's Gate from one of the least interesting possible perspectives: that of a United Artists executive apoplectic over spiraling costs and an arrogant director who'd clearly gone upriver and taken much of his studio's money with him. It's a little like reading an account of the Titanic from the perspective of the guy who owned the company that made the boat ("If you think it was a tragedy before just wait 'til you see what it did to our bottom line!"). Bach went on to write a stellar biography of Leni Reifenstahl that was burdened with the vanilla title Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Reifenstahl instead of my more honest and punchy proposed title: Leni Reifenstahl: Nazi Ho-Bag
Heaven's Gate helped put the final nail in the coffin of an unprecedented Hollywood Golden Age of experimentation and social consciousness that kicked off with Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider, but was a dealt a crippling blow by Jaws and Star Wars, two films that led a movement away from adult introspection in favor of escapist childhood regression. Much of the film's historic failure seems attributable to timing. If Heaven's Gate had been released the same year as The Wild Bunch, I suspect it would have been hailed as a profoundly flawed masterpiece. But when the film was released after a shoot that dragged on endlessly and went crazy overbudget, it was cited as further proof that Hollywood had finally gone too far, that yet another filmmaker gone wild had squandered a fortune pursuing his creative vision to disastrous ends.
Watching Heaven's Gate today, it's easy to see why Cimino could look at dailies and think he had a timeless masterpiece on his hands. It's equally easy to see how Bach could look at those same dailies and think he was looking at a looming financial disaster. From a creative standpoint, funding a movie like Heaven's Gate was risky. From a financial standpoint, it was fucking insane.
Writer-director Michael Cimino accrued a lot of leverage following the phenomenal success of >The Deer Hunter, another troubled, crazily ambitious epic. But I imagine that if you went to a mall and asked people whether they'd rather see a violent, depressing, visually sumptuous, nearly four-hour-long Western about a class war between ranchers and immigrants in 19th century Wyoming from the creator of The Deer Hunter or a comedy about a robot that runs for President, 99% of the respondents would opt for the comedy. I suspect that even if you limited the polling sample to Cimino's immediate family, the results would be the same.
With Heaven's Gate, Cimino went from being one of the hottest filmmakers alive to a persona non grata in show business circles. He went from the auteur of the future to dead man walking. His career and reputation never recovered from the one-two punch of the film's legendarily troubled filming and box-office death. Cimino hasn't directed a film since 1996's The Sunchasers and even that went direct-to-DVD. Rarely has a filmmaker fallen so far so fast. Cimino could have resurrected his career with 1984's Footloose, but he was fired from that gig after the shoot threatened to turn into Heaven's Gate: The Musical.
Yet today Heaven's Gate stands as a stirring testament to Cimino's superlative gift as a cinematic stylist. It's a film of rare beauty and scope, a feast for the eyes and a harrowing, unflinching meditation on the cruelty of capitalism. It rivals William Friedkin's Sorceror in its bone-deep cynicism and eviscerating take on the free market's coal-black heart of darkness. In Heaven's Gate, being poor and an immigrant is a crime punishable by death and the lives of the poor have less value than the cattle they steal to keep from starving.
The director's cut of Heaven's Gate begins with a stunning series of set pieces set at the Harvard graduation of lead Kris Kristofferson and dissolute chum John Hurt, the booze-sodden class orator and all-around cut-up. From the first frame, Cimino's roving camera goes anywhere and everywhere, panning endlessly and ecstatically across lushly orchestrated processions and a dance where the camera becomes a silent partner to the boozy, bleary graduates reveling in a hard-won sense of accomplishment. Cimino conveys in deliriously cinematic terms the pomp and grandeur of an Ivy League graduation. It's the benediction of the next generation of American aristocrats, filled with lawyers and Senators and other masters of the universe.
This luscious sustained glimpse of upper-class heaven makes the inevitable descent into working-class hell all the more heartbreaking. The film then flashes forward 20 years to the wild frontier land of Wyoming, where Kristofferson works as sheriff when not stealing drinks from his flask. To curb the theft of cattle, an association run by rich ranchers assembles a "Death List" of suspected rustlers, anarchists, and all-around ne'er-do-wells that essentially encompasses the entire county Kristofferson serves. It's class war at its most vicious and overt, legalized murder to be carried out by an army of professional assassins while the powers that be look the other way. The rule of law has been overruled by the power of the almighty dollar. Christopher Walken co-stars as one of the rancher's most brutally efficient enforcers and the third part of a love triangle between Kristofferson and French brothel keeper Isabelle Huppert.
Walken has an introductory scene of startling power. At first he's seen only in shadow reflected through a sheet hanging in the wind, an image of civilizing sophistication in his hat and suit. Slowly, gradually, a rifle's outline emerges before Walken aims his rifle and blows a hole through the sheet and into a knife-wielding immigrant's stomach, killing him instantly. It's only then that we realize that it's Walken doing the killing. Walken is recognizable onscreen for only a split second but that's all it takes to establish him as a figure of brutal, heartless authority, a cold-blooded killer in an untamed land.