Movie review for the day

Manohla Dargis has a review in The New York Times about the rerun of an old movie:

What was Michael Cimino thinking, the day he pulled up to the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills in his Rolls-Royce Corniche, three months before the release of his second, much-anticipated film, The Deer Hunter, and seven months before he began shooting his third— possibly the costliest film ever made about class war?
That day in September of 1978 he was having lunch with Steven Bach, an executive at United Artists, to discuss working together. At some point their conversation turned to Cimino’s passion project, The Johnson County War, about a brief, bloody chapter in American history that, in 1892, pitted big cattlemen against small and left two dead. By the time that project opened in 1980, it had swelled into a 3-hour-39-minute scandal called Heaven’s Gate, and the list of casualties had grown.
Widely reviled and feverishly admired, Heaven’s Gate holds one of the most contested places in American movie history. It has been called a disaster and a disgrace, yet also anointed a masterpiece. In unsympathetic accounts of its making, it is a $44 million object lesson in directorial ego and executive incompetence— the film that torpedoed both a legendary studio and New Hollywood, that period in American cinema characterized by auteur-driven works like Bonnie and Clyde.
In this same telling, Heaven’s Gate helped usher in the blockbuster age emblematized by the likes of Jaws and Star Wars, those pop behemoths that, like the rednecks who blow away the freewheeling bikers at the end of Easy Rider, annihilated the era’s visionaries.
There are other versions of what happened to Heaven’s Gate and why, including Cimino’s. “All of those years,” he told the critic Scott Foundas, “I felt like Heaven’s Gate was a beautiful, fantastically colored balloon tied to a string fastened to my wrist, so the balloon could never fly.”
A new restoration, supervised by Cimino and produced by the Criterion Collection, has helped cut loose that balloon. And it has soared. Last year the restoration played in the Venice Film Festival and the Masterworks section of the New York Film Festival, and Criterion released it on DVD and Blu-ray. It opened at Film Forum for a week’s run buoyed by excited acclaim; a reminder that, when it comes to movies and their meanings, context matters as much as text.
Watching Heaven’s Gate for the first time, I understood how it could mean so many seemingly contradictory things to so many people, and why so many dissimilar conclusions could all feel true. The film’s scope, natural backdrops, massive sets, complex choreography and cinematography are seductive, at times stunning, and if you like watching swirling people and cameras, you may love it. If you insist on strong narratives, white hats and black, uniform performances, audible dialogue, and a happy ending, well, you will have history and consensus on your side. (The film’s turbulent history— amazingly, given the stakes, it was yanked from distribution soon after it opened— also helped explain why I had never seen it.)
Heaven’s Gate, in brief, pivots on a Wyoming marshal, Averill (played by Kris Kristofferson), who’s first seen as a youth at his Harvard commencement, where a graybeard (played by Joseph Cotten) encourages the class with “a high ideal, the education of a nation.” In apparent rejoinder Averill’s friend Irvine (played by John Hurt) jokes through his own speech, announcing: “We disclaim all intention of making a change in what we esteem, on the whole, well arranged.”
Twenty years later, Averill works in a Wyoming town populated by immigrant homesteaders who will soon be attacked by the cattle barons, whose numbers include Irvine. Averill is having an affair with a madam, Ella (played by Isabelle Huppert), who’s also carrying on with Nate (played by the ethereally beautiful Christopher Walken), a hired gun for the cattlemen, but also Averill’s friend.
This romantic triangle echoes the central relationship in The Deer Hunter and suggests the kind of utopian vision of free love echoed by the communitarian spirit that runs throughout Heaven’s Gate, particularly in the image of the locals, who, with their babble of Slovak, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and accented English constitute a veritable Ellis Island on the range, as they roller-skate at a rink called Heaven’s Gate. Adorned with the legend A Moral and Exhilarating Experience, the rink, run by John L. Bridges (who is played by a real-life descendant, Jeff Bridges), mirrors the populist pleasures and democratic promise of an emergent mass entertainment: the cinema. For their part the cattle barons can be seen as a murderous version of those film pioneers who turned the movies into an industry.
The cinema, with its film cans and unspooling reels, also finds an echo in the film’s striking use of circles, specifically in three astonishing, complexly choreographed sequences of roller-skating, a waltz at Harvard (to The Blue Danube) and a dusty battle. All these circles call to mind the carousel of time (time being another theme) and points to Cimino’s interest in architecture and, perhaps too in adapting Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead.” The final image of Heaven’s Gate, of a man alone on the deck of a yacht, brings to mind the opening of The Fountainhead, in which the protagonist, Howard Roark, stands near a lake as the world looks “suspended in space, an island floating on nothing”. (The Fountainhead, like other Rand works, also features a romantic triangle.)
The restoration looks good projected, if surprisingly bright for a film that, in his review, Roger Ebert complained was “so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen”. In a 1981 Millimeter article about the making of the film, its cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, wrote that Cimino wanted to “re-create in the audience the experience of being in the West back in those days, when things were noisy and smoky and very, very dusty and dirty.”
As a restoration demo on the Criterion Blu-ray demonstrates, some of the scenes that looked sepia, almost nicotine brown, have been altered so that the green grass and blue sky pop almost as brightly as they would in Technicolor. This may be a restoration, but it also appears to be an act of directorial revisionism.
By all means, see it on the big screen, if only to appreciate the enormity of Cimino’s efforts. One take on the initial failure of Heaven’s Gate is that it was sabatoged, though it’s unclear by whom. Schadenfreude is a spectator sport in the movie industry, and maybe the five Oscars that The Deer Hunter won the month that Cimino started shooting Heaven’s Gate made him a target. But so did his lavish spending— he had an irrigation system built under the battlefield so the grass would be green before it was washed in red— and his increasingly expensive delays.
In August of 1979, Variety reported that the movie— scheduled for a seventeen-week shoot— was wrapping its sixteenth week with no definite end in sight, and that the original twelve million dollar budget was projected to hit thirty million. The next month, The Los Angeles Times ran an article that detailed a shoot plagued by injuries and dangerous conditions. (A horse died.)
Directorial ego, overruns, worker complaints, and, unfortunately, even animal abuse are par for the cinematic course. What was unusual— at least by today’s strict standards that find movie companies tightly controlling information at every stage of production— was how freely United Artists executives talked about the problems with Heaven’s Gate before it was released. A few months before its disastrous opening, Bach— the same man who had first heard about Cimino’s passion project at the Polo Lounge— made a remarkable confession. “The industry, to a degree, has abdicated to directors,” Bach told The Wall Street Journal. The Journal reporter, in all apparent seriousness, then asked if the auteur theory could be blamed. Bach said no. “I think there is a general view,” Bach offered by way of another explanation, “that what a director does is quite a mysterious thing, and that when push comes to shove that mysterious vision must be allowed to operate without the kinds of strictures you would apply to a contractor who was building your swimming pool.” Ah, Hollywood.
On 20 November 1980, the day after it opened in New York City— almost a year after its original planned release date— Heaven’s Gate was pulled from distribution by United Artists, and its Los Angeles premiere canceled. That same day Cimino issued a statement in the form of a letter to the president of United Artists saying that he and his crew had been “locked in an around-the-clock effort” to meet the release date. “It is painfully obvious to me,” he wrote, “that the pressures of this schedule and the missing crucial step of public previews clouded my perception of the film.” They had rushed to finish, and he wanted to re-edit it.
He did. A two-and-a-half-hour version opened the next April, but it didn’t help or at least didn’t seem to, and this cut disappeared too. Thereafter the film was eulogized in news articles that read like autopsy reports and in assorted books, most memorably Bach’s excellent, painfully funny 1985 back-story account of the ordeal in Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of ‘Heaven’s Gate’.” (For a later edition, Bach, who died in 2009, sharpened the subtitle to Art, Money and Ego in the Making of ‘Heaven’s Gate’, the Film That Sank United Artists.”)
Yet, though it was bludgeoned by critics, journalists and plenty of industry pundits, including some from United Artists, the film never really died. Instead it flopped around gasping for air, and then slowly wiggled back to insistent life.
In Final Cut, Bach wrote that no one actually saw the shorter version. “They saw, instead of the movie on the screen, the movie they had been told about by forests of newsprint, by cascades of critical condemnation.” Decades later that condemnation is largely a memory (as are some of those forests) and it is possible to see Heaven’s Gate for what it is: a film with greatness in it but also longueurs, a fascinating artifact and a monument to Cimino’s towering ambitions, as much for himself as for his art. He sought to recreate the Old West in the film, but the greater marvel is how he tried to replicate Old Hollywood and a dream world that once was, a world that, these days, is often made in computers.
Fittingly the Criterion Blu-ray includes a line that the restoration, all 216 “definitive” minutes of it, is his “final cut”— two words that he has now reclaimed along with his film.

Rico says he didn't like it when it came out, but he'll see it again...