OVP: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Film: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Stars: Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Isabelle Huppert, Joseph Cotten, Jeff Bridges, Terry O'Quinn

Director: Michael Cimino

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction...though at the 1981 Oscars, not 1980)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Kris Kristofferson: click here to learn more about Mr. Kristofferson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

While we didn't start this season with John Wayne (I wanted to pick a month with five Saturday's for Wayne given how important he is to the western genre), I made a point of covering The Big Trail this year, which was not the first Hollywood western, but it was the first one to be playing in the field of "epic tale of good-vs-evil" that would be a hallmark of the genre for the next fifty years.  Even after the collapse of the studio system, the western survived well into the 1970's, in some cases because people like Wayne continued to be profitable even as other Golden Age actors fell.  But in the same way that The Big Trail was a landmark for the western but not the first, Heaven's Gate was not the epitaph of the western...but it did mark the end of it as a major, consistent presence in Hollywood.  Michael Cimino's follow-up to his acclaimed (and commercially successful) war film The Deer Hunter was a gargantuan bomb, one of several that would happen throughout the 1980's, and would become synonymous with flops, to the point that when Kevin Costner's expensive failure Waterworld came out, it was nicknamed by the press "Kevin's Gate."  Unlike Waterworld, though (which actually made a lot of money, just not enough to recoup its budget), Heaven's Gate has a weird second life in the decades since, hailed by many as a masterpiece, in some ways akin to what Cimino achieved with The Deer Hunter, and I have spent much of this year looking forward to it, though a little concerned by the 219-minute run time (not a typo-this film approaches Gone with the Wind-levels of patience).  I was curious what the "last" Hollywood western would have in store for me.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is an epic tale focusing on the real-life Johnson County War that took place in the 1890's in Wyoming.  Despite a gigantic, long story, you can actually summarize it pretty quickly.  We have at its core Averill (Kristofferson), who starts the film a promising young man at school, but in a flash forward we understand he's now a grizzled marshall, someone who has seen too much of the world, and is employed in Johnson County, which is seeing a battle between the cattle barons of the region and the burgeoning immigrant population trying to find a hold in the West.  The barons are angry about the immigrants, and want to pin a series of cattle thefts on them, and quickly decide to put bounties on the heads of 125 different immigrants in the area, in hopes of killing them and driving the remainder out.  The rest of the film centers around this conflict, and eventually involves a wide array of figures, including a bordello madam named Ella (Huppert), who is caught in a love triangle with Averill and a hired hand for the cattlemen named Champion (Walken), before culminating in almost everyone involved dying...but the immigrants likely being able to carry on in their homes.  Averill survives in the end, living on a yacht in a proper life that feels unfulfilling...a sign that he left his spirit in the West, never to be reclaimed.

Heaven's Gate became a flop for a couple of reasons.  First, the production is the stuff of legend, with Cimino allegedly having something of a God Complex (it was the 1970's, and we were entering the saturation point of auteur theory between this and Apocalypse Now!'s sprawling location shooting).  He went over budget, and months over deadline.  According to legend, one of the films stars (John Hurt) was able to shoot his Oscar-nominated turn in The Elephant Man during production of Heaven's Gate, it took so long to make.  Cimino would tear down sets for no reason, and the film basically ruined his career two years after being crowned the toast of Hollywood at the Academy Awards.  The film also destroyed United Artists, and caused it to be sold to MGM in 1981 during the tumultuous Kirk Kerkorian years for the studio.  The movie's budget basically made anything short of a Star Wars-style payday to be a flop, and on a $44 million budget, it barely cracked $3 million at the box office (a loss of $74 million when adjusted for inflation).

It's easy to see why the public didn't like the movie.  It's long, and while I saw the longer director's cut, it also doesn't need to be if you solely focus on plot.  There's not a lot here.  The tropes of a western (good vs. evil, the little guy being overtaken by a powerful government, a love triangle between a sex worker and two lawmen with different ethos) are all there, but in the 1950's you could get that done in 100 minutes...and Heaven's Gate does.  In the remaining 2 hours, you largely just see a really beautiful reconstruction of the West.  No extra plot, just pretty pictures.

There's a trend in recent years to only focus on the plot, to the point where many people who are against sex scenes in movies use "is it relevant to the plot?" to argue against certain scenes in movie (we saw that earlier this year with Oppenheimer).  But Heaven's Gate is a solid explanation as to why you shouldn't do that.  Because Heaven's Gate is a good movie almost entirely because of how it looks.  Film is a visual medium first-and-foremost, and Cimino definitely gets good use out of bankrupting a studio.  You see every penny of his work in the production design, costumes, & cinematography, all first-rate and glorious on the screen, with entire towns built from scratch and giving us a lived-in look at the west.  The film's fatal mistake (other than its accounting) is that it casts our star (apologies to Kris Kristofferson, who has had a rough month with me in terms of reviews) incorrectly.  Kristofferson is handsome & genial, but he's not Clint Eastwood or John Wayne-he doesn't have an automatic connection with the audience, and he's too reserved as an actor for us to invest four hours into his character.  It's easy to see years later, when he's now a legend, but Jeff Bridges (who plays a smaller role in the film) would've been perfect for the lead, and Kristofferson would've been a good fit for Bridges' less showy part, but in 1980 that wasn't the star structure that was in place.  Heaven's Gate would change that.  While Bridges would go on to fame, glory, & an Oscar in the decades that followed, Kristofferson would essentially be banished from the A-List after this movie, forced into character parts.  We'll get to one of his most notable ones, and the final western of 2023, in our season finale next week.