Review (Blu-ray): HEAVEN’S GATE (1980)

REVIEW (blu-ray): HEAVEN’S GATE (1980)

Dir-Scr: Michael Cimino

A United Artists Release

An indelibly maligned and misunderstood masterwork of New Hollywood cinema, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (that’s the title in big letters on the spine and cover) has received a November, 2011, blu-ray restoration and critical reprieve courtesy the ever reliable Criterion Collection, and it’s one of the label’s most vital and important releases ever. With the passage of thirty-two years and a proper visual presentation of the preferred, original cut of the film (minus the original intermission point) at hand, here we may at last enjoy and evaluate the picture on its own terms.

During its one-week award qualifying run in New York during December, 1980, the already-roundly excoriated financial boondoggle was then also critically lambasted by a cadre of likeminded writers led by Vincent Canby of the New York Times, and the film’s reception seemed a self-fulfilling prophecy come to pass: see, it was a waste of money. But what’s clear now is that the long knives were out before the film had even had a chance to make its way into the general culture for a broader interpretation and evaluation. Withdrawn and severely edited into a much shorter but less coherent version, the truncated Heaven’s Gate was released four months later to an equally poor reception, but who could blame the rest of the world? They hadn’t seen the real film, only a desperately hacked edition designed to recoup as much of the enormous investment as possible.

In 2000, the longer version of the picture finally debuted on home video, in the form of a DVD that seemed to validate the original criticism leveled at the movie in one crucial area, that of an apparent murky visual palette and texture—all that money for this dusty, sepia epic? (One wag wrote that the movie should do wonders for the sales of Murine.) Story-wise, however, this long version had a certain rhythm and clarity that made sense in a way that the rushed version didn’t—the film’s tone at that length is more languid, melancholic, and suitable to its ultimately tragic story of a U. S. government and establishment willing to employ legalized mass murder to get its political and financial ends met. Not exactly happy movie time material for Christmas 1980.

The film, which at its heart believes in the beauty and purpose and possibility in a land of such grandeur as the western United States, is no less critical of the fact that, however many of the poor immigrants who die at the hands of the elites who own and run Johnson County, Wyoming, the wealthy capitalist we see first as dancing as an Ivy League dandy-turned-lawmen does not pay the ultimate price even for defending the hapless and doomed designees on the kill lists—the rich guys always not only get away with it all, but they usually end up richer. That James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) is a brokenhearted and wealthy survivor on his boat off the ‘golden coast’ of Rhode Island is a much happier end, though, than suffered by his real life counterpart, who ended up hanged for his part in trying to defend the immigrants of Johnson County from the wealthy magnate members of the cattleman’s association, and their hired killers sent to exterminate the ‘thieves and anarchists’ rustling cattle from the enormous herds grazing on open public lands. “This is no longer a poor man’s country,” Sam Waterston’s elitist figurehead says of the immigrants preying on the rich man’s cattle, and Jeff Bridges’s proletarian barkeep notes that it’s ‘gotten dangerous to be poor (a condition Avery notes has been ever thus), so it isn’t difficult to read the film on a thematic level.

Nor does it stretch one’s attention or understanding to follow the emotional arc, which is predicated on a classic romantic triangle among Averill, Christopher Walken’s ‘Nate Champion,’ a pitiless hitman working for the rich boys, and Ella (Isabelle Huppert, fetching and often nude), a classic hooker-with-heart-of-gold archetype. The romantic subplot reeks of its archetypical storytelling and Hollywood roots, yes, but rather than feel trite, the tropes seem to offer a crucial and familiar dramatic underpinning that pays tribute to the western genre entertainments of the past, perhaps in order to cushion the body-blow of the dark story that surrounds this intertwined plot concerning the interaction on a human level of one of the elites with two characters who are themselves part of the tapestry of immigrants. Rest assured that no Hollywood western of the classic era would have featured such a grim and morally repugnant story featuring Ivy League graduates heading west and committing atrocities in the name of the government, and worse, of commerce. Lastly, worth noting is that the romantic triangle plot is itself a sub-tragedy that, along with the all-out range war that climaxes the picture, leaves the patient and attentive viewer with a sense of epic emotional and dramatic sweep befitting the greatest of classic movie benchmarks, an honor and accord more than earned by this magisterial and challenging piece of cinema.

Visually and aurally, Criterion’s new transfer is as sparkling, clean, and clear as the mountain water in which the beautiful Huppert bathes on her lovely and peaceful picnic with white-hat lover Averill. What had appeared murky to the critics in 1980, and perhaps worse on the MGM DVD release that Cimino attributes to the use of a color-shifted projection print found in Europe and the last surviving copy of the long version of the movie, has here been lovingly and carefully color-timed to bring out the absolute beauty in every frame. Images here include some of the most magnificent scenery of any American film ever, and while acquired at great financial and physical cost to cast, crew, and the studio, United Artists, that as legend would have it went down the tubes principally because of this one film, more than reward initial and repeat viewings.

Even more significant, perhaps, to the novice viewer’s enjoyment of the film is the carefully reconstructed 5.1 sound mix, which addresses prior problems associated with buried dialogue coupled with thick immigrant accents—scenes that before went by in blurs of hard-to-understand exchanges now play with much improved clarity. The humanity on display among the immigrant characters of this horrendous American small-scale holocaust, based on a true piece of our history and character as a nation, lends the story gravitas and weight far beyond the typical action Western.

Extras include a slideshow documentary narrated by director Cimino and producer Joann Carelli, as well as contemporary interview with others such as Kristofferson and music arranger David Mansfield. Criterion’s release of this neglected and misunderstood piece of essential American art is well worth its premium price, and more than deserving of a broad reevaluation and inclusion in the canon of the grandest, most perceptive and humane motion picture epics ever produced. Along with Warren Beatty’s Reds, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate represents the closing of an artistic epoch of American moviemaking the likes of which the culture may never again see duplicated. Highest recommendation.

Presented in its original aspect ratio of 2.39:1, encoded with MPEG-4 AVC and granted a 1080p transfer, the following text appears inside the booklet provided with this Blu-ray release:

“Because the original negative of the film was cut down to 149 minutes during its theatrical release in 1981, it could not serve as the basis for this restoration of director Michael Cimino’s preferred 216-minute version. Fortunately, the long version had been preserved in the 35mm YCM color separation masters (protection elements capable of precisely reproducing the color in the negative film). Supervised by Cimino, this new digital transfer was created at Colorworks in Culver City, California, by scanning each separation element at 2K resolution on a Scanity, then digitally recombining them to reproduce the color of the original negative. In addition, slight trims and alterations were made to certain scenes and the intermission was removed, allowing the filmmaker to finally have his vision presented as he originally intended. Thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, warps, jitter, and flicker were manually removed using MTI’s DRS and Pixel Farm’s PFClean, while Image Systems’ Phoenix was used for small dirt, grain, and noise reduction.

Transfer supervisors: Michael Cimino, Maria Palazzola.

Colorist: Sheri Eisenberg.”

(A poster that hung on my bedroom wall for months leading up to the aborted holiday release)