'HEAVEN'S GATE'.......DISASTERPIECE OR MASTERPIECE?......BQ WEIGHS IN.......

Heaven's Gate (1980)    For the hell of it, we thought we'd dive into the Grand Canyon-sized abyss that separates the 1980's film critics, (who roasted this movie like a barbecued pig on a spit) with the new millennium judgement that it's a maligned classic..........

            We wade into this debate having finally decided to eat up our rapidly aging life with the 3 hours and 38 minutes required to view writer-director Michael Cimino's Director's Cut.......

            Our take?   Just as in real life, you find the truth of the matter tends to fall somewhere in between the two extremes........

             Even before the film's 1980 release date, critics and pundits had already feasted on a steady stream of bad press about the troubled production history..........by the time they actually got to see the movie, they were more pumped to deal out a lethal thumbs-down than the worst bloodthirsty Coliseum mobs of Ancient Rome........

             And what a ton of red meat they chomped on.......the hubis and directorial dementia of Cimino, his ego inflated to Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon proportions by his "'Deer Hunter" Oscars.......the film's out-of-control shooting schedule and runaway budget, which ultimately destroyed United Artists, the studio that took pride in allowing its directors their artistic freedom......(as long they adhered to their initial budgets)........

              Studios took note of all this toxic chaos and "Heaven's Gate" served as the final nail in the coffin of the 70's era in which young directors were indulged without any studio control or oversight. The era of the corporate-controlled, crowd-pleasing blockbusters would soon dawn upon us.......

              Decades later, the film was rediscovered and celebrated as a long lost, misunderstood cinematic jewel......

              Jewel?  Hmmm........tarnished in so many ways, but yes, we found much to admire.....

              Deep, deep inside the 219 minute running time of "Heaven's Gate", we detected a sweeping, epic,compelling film, struggling to work its way out of the piles of unnecessary, excess footage.....

              We always likened Michael Cimino to a sort of American-ized Sergio Leone........not much of a storyteller, but oh what a Grand Opera visualist.  Like Leone, Cimino favored everything in his films done larger than life.......settings, scenery, scenes extended into elaborately choreographed set pieces, for no other reason than pure cinematic splendor.

              Unlike Leone, who varied his wide vistas with extreme closeups of his characters, Cimino had no such interest in the topography of his actors' faces.  Mostly, they remained distant figures in his stunning landscapes.......giving "Heaven's Gate" a remote quality, even in the midst of its grand emotions and perpetual violence.....

                Watching this movie in 2018, we couldn't help raising ironic eyebrows to its eerie relevance to America in the Dark Age Of Trump.......

               Cimino, in his blatant fictionalizing of the Johnson County, Wyoming battles between cattlemen and settlers, simplifies the Great Divide for us. It's basically rich, powerful entitled white men pitted against poor, struggling immigrants, most of whom don't speak English.  As the white guys' hired thugs beat up the "others", they're heard to scream out, "Why don't you go back where you came from!"

                 Ah, where have we heard that before?

                True, almost every scene in the film runs two to three minutes longer than it has to.  If ever a movie needed a brilliant, creative film editor ( a Dede Allen, for example).......a whole team of editors worked on this, but it's clear they gave in to Cimino's self-indulgent impulse to hang and frame every shot like an oil painting fit for the Louvre....

                 And we did grow weary of cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond swinging back and forth from that washed out burnt-orange (so beloved by cinematographers after the "Godfather I and II") to the genuine brilliance of the Montana scenery, doubling for Wyoming.

                Even having itemized those faults, we still found ourselves immersed and seduced by this expansive, cruel universe created by Cimino.  If you have the time and patience, the overwhelming imagery and tragic spectacle of the film inevitably draws you in......

                And isn't that what good filmmaking's about?

               No masterpiece by any means, but we don't regret a single minute of the time we spent with the uncut "Heaven's Gate"........a fractured, flawed epic indeed........but in its vaulting ambition and artistry, we'd rather sit through this than any of the latest CGI superhero slugfests. 3 stars (***)