In the history of film, nothing is more fascinating than movies that fail on a huge scale. Whether it be films that were so bad that they shifted trends or those that lost a ton of money on an unthinkable level, these movies are remembered for reasons that those involved in their creation never intended. However, of the many flops in this medium, one in particular has remained infamous and, more than any, marked the true end of an era for filmmaking. I am talking about the 1980 flop Heaven’s Gate.
It’s the story of Jim Averill, a graduate of Harvard who becomes the marshal of Johnson County in Wyoming. He has a relationship with a bordello head named Ellen and has put his focus on protecting the European migrants who have come to his country for a new life. However, he soon learns that cattle barons have set up a death list of migrants in his county, accused of stealing livestock, and hired gunmen to carry out this deed, with Nate Champion, a friend of Jim’s, being one of the enforcers. Now Jim has to contend with both the looming chaos coming to his county as well as his rocky relationship with Ellen, who has also fallen in love with Nate.
A passion project from director Michael Cimino, he wrote the initial script back in the early 70s, but was unable to get anyone to move on the project. It wasn’t until he made The Deer Hunter, his second film, that he got interest from the studio United Artists. United Artists was distinct as it was a studio founded by famous Hollywood individuals like Charlie Chaplin, as opposed to businessmen, and the mantra of the studio was to allow the director to have the freedom to make whatever they wanted. Internal shifts and studio politics resulted in new blood running the studio by the late 70s, and they were desperate to find a new crop of directors to make a name for themselves within the industry and the company. They gave Cimino basically whatever he wanted, and it resulted in a film that went over budget and behind schedule almost immediately.
The thing about Cimino is that he is a perfectionist, and the freedom he got with this project let out his worst impulses. A good example of this is a scene where the lead character has to wake up violently and crack a whip. Normally, this would be a basic scene done probably within an hour or two. Cimino ended up spending a whole day on this one shot and had over 50 takes on it. He would tear down buildings in his massive sets if he didn’t think they looked good or were too close together. He had all the actors rigorously train to embody the characters of the Old West, even if they were extras or had small roles. He built an irrigation system, without asking the studio, so the final battle of the movie would have green grass that would get bloodied and mangled over time (which wouldn’t really be seen because of how much dust the fight kicks up). It got to a point that he had shot over 1.5 million feet of footage, and rumors swirled in the press about the director’s behavior and how United Artists was unable to control him. Eventually, they were able to rein him in, but the film that was set to have a budget of around 12 million mushroomed into a 32 to 40 million dollar one, which was around 100 to 150 million in today’s money.
By the time it got to the screening room at UA, the film was a 5-and-a-half-hour behemoth with Cimino reportedly saying he could lose about 15 minutes of it. By the time it premiered, the story became such a circus in the eyes of the industry that it was immediately derided as a disaster to the point that Cimino recut it to be shorter, and that only made things worse. By the end, not only did Heaven’s Gate make only a couple of million and put the future of United Artists into jeopardy, but it also signaled the end of the New Hollywood that dominated the 70s. A string of high-profile, directorially driven bombs such as Sorcerer by William Friedkin, One from the Heart by Francis Ford Coppola, and New York New York by Martin Scorsese, which was topped off by the Heaven’s Gate fiasco, resulted in a culture shift within Hollywood. Directors could still have their way, but producers and studio heads would be in far more control, and the high-concept blockbuster that was kicked off by the success of Star Wars was the future. The age of New Hollywood in the 70s had officially ended, and a new period of higher concept, market-focused filmmaking had begun.
As time has gone on, more have become kinder to Heaven’s Gate and have called it a mistreated masterpiece. Having finally seen it, while I can understand where that perspective comes from, I can also see why it was such a derided movie at the time. It’s over 3 and a half hours long, and normally, I advocate for a film taking advantage of its length. The issue I have with Heaven’s Gate is that it is less interested in story and character and more in meandering sequences. A good example I have is that there’s a conversation started by Jim and Ellen about him wanting her to leave that’s interrupted by a 5-minute roller skate dance scene (a minute of which is spent only on a violin player), which then goes to Jim and Ellen having an intimate waltz in the same rink, and then goes back to them continuing the same conversation from earlier. I normally like it when films focus on odd tangents or simply show the world it’s created. It gives texture to a film and little insights about the characters without doing too much. The issue here is that not only does it drag, but the film and its tangents also don’t really present any interesting characters or dynamics to keep the investment.
Jim is flat and doesn’t really showcase a motive as to why he’s involved here, other than it being a good thing to do. There are implications of his moving away from his rich heritage to help the people, but this gets no focus or dialogue. His relationship with Ellen is basic, and we’re never shown any sort of connection or relationship between him and Nate outside of a random throwaway line and their conflict over Ellen and the death list. John Hurt plays a former classmate of Jim who is the only baron to oppose the death list, and Jeff Bridges plays a businessman who’s closely involved with Jim and the county. Both feel superfluous, especially Hurt, who is introduced in the intro prologue as an important character, but ends up just being a background character by the end. The migrants are not given any distinctive characterization either as individuals or as a group, which makes them feel like sympathetic and realized characters and more like tools for the plot. We spend so much time with these characters but know so little about them. This applies to the plot as well, since we spend so much time basically meandering that there isn’t much forward momentum on the conflict. We’re introduced to the death list before the end of the first hour, and it doesn’t come back until about an hour later. It doesn’t feel disjointed, but it doesn’t feel like anything of substance, character or plot-wise really happens.
I can give credit to the beauty of the movie. It does look like a film that was finely tuned in terms of shots and locations. The final battle, while chaotic, is really engaging and a sight to behold. And overall, I was compelled by the experience and felt that individual elements and scenes really worked for me. It’s just an issue of it not working as a cohesive whole. It frankly feels like Cimino was more interested in filmmaking first and simply fell too in love with the craft of it all at the expense of everything else. I’m not saying that films with thin characters or a focus on visuals overall are bad. Take Days of Heaven, another western-centric movie focusing far more on visuals than story and characters. There, not only is the film much shorter at around 90 minutes, but the basic structure is far more engaging, and the visuals are even more spectacular. One of my favorite movies of all time is Once Upon a Time in America. An almost 4-hour gangster epic that has so much focus on so many things that it can make your head spin. And yet, every element feels like it builds upon its themes and elevates the simple characterizations simply by how they interact and react to certain things. Those films use either loose storytelling or long pacing to their advantage, while Heaven’s Gate doesn’t really do anything.
I admire what Heaven’s Gate wants to be about. A western that fully interacts with the ugly truth of the American dream about how the rich in this country will treat the poor and downtrodden with contempt and use the system to their advantage to do heinous things. It arguably keeps staying relevant as a thematic point, especially since the way the barons frame and treat the migrants is no different from how the relationship between the rich and immigrants in this country is today. And yet, so much of the film meanders and focuses on frankly uninteresting relationships that I don’t feel like it actually says anything about this conflict. It feels less like a deep theme and more like pointing out something deep in a random conversation with no correlation. Even as a historical piece, it’s not even accurate to the history of Johnson County and uses names of other historical figures for fictitious purposes. For all the talk of authenticity and how much Cimino focused on making the world feel lived in, I don’t feel like I know anything about this conflict outside of the basic aspects.
I ultimately only liked Heaven’s Gate fine, but found it frustrating as well. A film with so much craft and effort behind it, to the detriment of the studio system itself, shouldn’t be this dull. All the other high-profile flops by auteurs were uniformly more interesting either in their execution or even as basic experiences. Cimino was more focused on making the perfect film that he forgot why his previous works were successful. The Deer Hunter works despite its long length because it’s focused on its leads and what they go through, and every sequence, even the ones that do go on for long, follows their perspective and how it affects them. Heaven’s Gate is just too messy to have anything be its real focus. I do wonder if Cimino was just not ready to make this project since it was only his 3rd movie, and he only got the chance due to desperate executives throwing him a blank check after his breakout. Imagine if Nolan tried to make Oppenheimer after Memento or Spielberg made Schindler’s List after Jaws. To make great work, you sometimes need to further develop your craft and become more confident to both know what to do and also make smart choices. Cimino had the confidence, but didn’t have the self-control or experience as a storyteller to rein in all his ideas. I will say that I do appreciate that he got to see the wave of reevaluation of the film before his passing, since he didn’t really deserve to be made a martyr for the industry. At the end of the day, I feel my frustration is more than I wanted to love this movie as so many others have, and I tend to be very open in liking plenty of other movies, but it was just not meant to be, I suppose. At least it’s a far more interesting film than most other failures these days.
