1980 Week: Heaven’s Gate

          Writer-director Michael Cimino’s magnum opus about greed, which has ironically become shorthand for the profligate excesses of auteur filmmaking, boasts enough commendable elements for a dozen movies. The story is a thoughtful riff on a fraught period in American history, the performances are sensitive and textured, the production values are awesome, and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s images are rapturous. Had Cimino been able to wrestle this material into shape, either at the time of the film’s original release or prior to one of its many reissues, he could have made a classic Hollywood epic. Famously, however, he did not. In its most widely acclaimed version, Heaven’s Gate runs three hours and 37 minutes, which is not inherently hubristic; Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is only one minute shorter. The problem is that Heaven’s Gate features at least an hour of repetitive material that, no matter how beautifully filmed, adds nothing to the dramatic experience. Hence, now and forever, Heaven’s Gate is known as the debacle that nearly bankrupted United Artists, the disaster that ballooned from an original budget of $11 million to a final cost of $44 million, and the death knell for the freedoms that maverick directors enjoyed in the ’70s. Ouch.

          The movie begins with a pointless 20-minute prologue that introduces protagonist Jim Averil (Kris Kristofferson) during his graduation from Harvard in 1870. The excess of the prologue, which features innumerable extras in elaborate costumes, is a bad omen. Once the movie cuts 20 years ahead, to 1890 Wyoming, things get moving (more or less). Averil has become a marshal tasked with overseeing a county populated by impoverished Eastern European immigrants. In the first volleys of a land war, cattlemen led by Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) hire gunmen to kill immigrants based on trumped-up charges. Eventually, a love triangle emerges between Averil, prostitute Ella (Isabelle Huppert), and gunman Nate Champion (Christopher Walken). Amid various subplots, the narrative builds toward a showdown between the haves and the have-nots, with our Principled Antihero caught in between.

          Alas, Cimino’s writing is nowhere near as strong as his direction. When he aims for subtlety, he achieves muddiness, and when he reaches for profundity, he achieves pretentiousness. Supporting characters feel underdeveloped, relationships grind through repetitive rhythms, and everything is grossly overproduced. Some of the film’s gigantic scenes are powerful, including the final showdown, but some are laughable—notably the 10-minute roller-skating scene. Cimino’s missteps are especially disappointing because he gathered such an interesting cast and, for the most part, gave the actors viable emotions to play. Kristofferson fares the worst, since his understated screen persona exacerbates the movie’s lazy pacing, but he connects periodically. Walken fares the best, his innate eccentricity helping him forge an individualized character. Yet costars Jeff Bridges and Brad Dourif are almost completely wasted.

          Even though it’s possible there’s a great movie buried inside Heaven’s Gate, it becomes more and more difficult to see potential as the minutes tick by and the problems accumulate. Nonetheless, there’s some comfort it knowing the situation could have been worse. The first version of Heaven’s Gate that Cimino showed to understandably flabbergasted United Artists executives was five hours long.

Heaven’s Gate: FUNKY

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

          Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy screen persona had solidified by the mid-’70s, as had his stringent control over projects—even when he wasn’t also directing, Eastwood ensured that his films were brand-consistent and supremely efficient. Given this closely held authority, it’s interesting to look at the handful of ’70s pictures for which Eastwood gave other filmmakers more latitude than usual. A good case in point is Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, the directorial debut of Michael Cimino, whose subsequent films—notably The Deer Hunter (1978) and Heaven’s Gate (1980)—are known for their epic scale. Obviously, “epic” wasn’t going to fly with Eastwood, so Cimino, who also write Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, confined his ambitions to a tight storyline, although Cimino’s taste for big-canvas cinema is evident in the John Ford-style panoramic shots of various Montana locations.

          A straightforward crime picture with an undercurrent of fatalism, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot begins when exuberant young car thief Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) encounters a country preacher (Eastwood) who is inexplicably running from a maniac with a machine pistol. After helping the preacher escape, Lightfoot learns his new pal is actually the infamous bank robber known as “Thunderbolt” because he once used a cannon to bust into a vault. The man trying to kill Thunderbolt is a former accomplice, Leary (George Kennedy), who mistakenly believes Thunderbolt stole the haul from a heist they committed together. Eventually, Leary catches up with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and accepts Thunderbolt’s story that the money was lost, so the three men—together with Leary’s nervous wingman, Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), conspire to rob another bank and replace the missing cash. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot isn’t precisely a buddy movie or a heist picture, nor is it merely a car-chase flick or a thriller. Rather, it’s an ingenious amalgam of all of those genres, a sampler plate of manly-man tropes.

          Individualization is generally kept to a minimum so characters can function as archetypes, although Brudges’ buoyant performance distinguishes Lightfoot from everyone else—he’s brash and irresponsible, yet so full of life he makes even the worst situations feel like exciting adventures. Cimino avoids romanticizing the lifestyles of his characters, accentuating the collateral damage criminals inflict and illustrating the cost criminals pay for making dangerous choices. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is so offbeat and so well made, from the atmospheric production values to the painterly cinematography, that it’s tempting to read deeper meanings into the material, especially when Bridges’ vibrant acting raises Eastwood’s game in their shared scenes. Alas, this is really just an elevated brand of escapism, which means its virtues are, on close inspection, quite modest. That said, the picture is highly rewarding for viewers with appropriately calibrated expectations.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot: GROOVY

The Deer Hunter (1978)

          The winner of five Oscars and one of the best-remembered movies of the ’70s, The Deer Hunter has undeniable strengths. The acting is across-the-board great, with Christopher Walken earning an Academy Award for the film’s crucial supporting role; Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep were nominated for the male and female leading roles, respectively, and John Cazale and John Savage both contribute mesmerizing work. The film’s level of intensity, once the story kicks into gear, is so high that many find the film too painful to watch. On every technical plane, the movie is gorgeous to behold, with immaculate costuming and production design filling cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s Oscar-nominated imagery to create a rich visual experience. And, finally, since The Deer Hunter was one of the first big-budget movies to address the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder as a major issue for veterans returning from the Vietnam War, it has historical importance.

          Having said all that, The Deer Hunter hasn’t aged well, and in fact its flaws were apparent to some discerning viewers back when the movie was new. First off, director and co-writer Michael Cimino’s storytelling is wildly undisciplined. The first hour of the picture, which introduces a group of male friends living in a Pennsylvania steel town, drags on endlessly. Although Cimino’s scheme of immersing viewers in mundane details of his characters’ lives before moving the story to Vietnam is sensible, Cimino ends up delivering the same information over and over again, resulting in tedium. In particular, the interminable sequence depicting the wedding of wide-eyed Steven (Savage) to his pregnant sweetheart unfolds in what feels like real time. Amid this narrative muck, De Niro’s character, Michael, emerges as the de facto leader of the group, an autodidactic tough guy whom the others fear and respect in equal measure.

          A long sequence of the male friends bonding for one last deer hunt before deploying to Vietnam has great visual poetry, but it’s jarring that the sequence was obviously shot in the Pacific Northwest (specifically, Washington state) even though it supposedly takes place in Pennsylvania. The movie really goes off the rails, however, after an abrupt mid-movie shift to Vietnam. For the remainder of the movie, the vicious game of Russian roulette becomes the dramatic focus, first when American POWs are forced to play the game by their animalistic captors, and then when Nick (Walken) becomes a champion Roulette player working the postwar Vietnamese underground. Michael is a kind of battlefield superhero during the POW scenes, and the manner in which he rescues his buddies stretches believability. Yet the story becomes even more audacious when Michael returns to postwar Vietnam in order to rescue Nick, who has become so traumatized, almost to the point of catatonia, that he plays Russian roulette for money.

          It turns out there’s a good reason why none of this hangs together particularly well. Producer Michael Deeley reportedly hired Cimino to expand a non-Vietnam script about Russian roulette into the story that eventually became The Deer Hunter. Perhaps reflecting this hodgepodge approach, the Russian roulette material is so overwrought, and so demeaning to the Vietnamese national character, that it completely derives the film of dramatic restraint and historical accuracy. Whether historical accuracy was ever the goal is another question, but The Deer Hunter ends up being an uncomfortable hybrid of incompatible narrative elements, and also a needlessly repetitive movie that slogs through 183 minutes of boredom and brutality. There are incandescent moments, mostly due to the valiant work of a remarkable cast, but in sum, The Deer Hunter is pretentious, sloppy, unpleasant, and not just a little racist.

The Deer Hunter: FUNKY