Hollywood Harakiri: Take 2

By RICHARD CORLISS

HEAVEN'S GATE Directed and Written by Michael Cimino

It's been a hard time in the Old West for Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson). Any marshal would have his hands full in 1890s Wyoming trying to forestall a range war between the evil cattlemen and the noble but fractious settlers. So when he reaches the home--whorehouse, actually--of his beloved madam, Ella (Isabelle Huppert), all Jim wants is some good loving and a week's worth of shuteye. No such luck: Ella has baked a pie for her beau. "It took me a whole day to make it," she purrs, "So you eat all of it." With courtly resignation, Jim takes a bite. It tastes awful, but he manfully digs in. He owes Ella that much for favors received and favors anticipated.

Perhaps critics owed Michael Cimino that much when, last November, they sat in a Manhattan theater for the first screening of Heaven's Gate. The critics had praised Cimino's pictorial and political extravagances in The Deer Hunter; here he was describing another romantic triangle tested in time of war. It had taken him two years and $36 million to make his 3-hr. 40-min. western, so they'd better eat all of it. They didn't: the critics were outraged by the expenditure of all that time, talent, money and solemnity on a story that Zane Grey could have told in 30 pages and John Ford shown in 30 minutes. They should have realized that narrative coherence is to Cimino as a snake is to an elephant: he doesn't ignore it so much as trample over it. The Deer Hunter was a botch as a story, but it had redeeming social delirium. No such luck with Heaven's Gate. An eye for portentous vistas and a yen for pretentious allegory--just those factors that won The Deer Hunter its raves and Oscars--proved Cimino's undoing when he moved from Viet Nam 1970 to Johnson County 1890.

Justice was swift in the Old West; vengeance is mined in the New Hollywood. United Artists, which had rashly built the film's publicity campaign on the hope of rave reviews, withdrew Heaven's Gate in the wake of devastating pans. And the rash spread. Within days, all Hollywood was being held responsible for one director's profligacy, one studio's negligence. Every big-budget movie was the target of japery: Robert Evans' Popeye became "Evans' Gate," Warren Beatty's forthcoming Reds was "Warren's Gate."

In the new mood, moguls turned frantic, searching their silk purses for overpriced sows' ears. Penny pinching was back in style, and the omnipotent auteur was on the ropes. U.A. Executive Steven Bach, who once called Cimino "the Michelangelo of film," now pointed out that his director had been "behind five days in shooting-- in six days." Universal's Ned Tanen noted that The Deer Hunter, which his studio coproduced, had gone 50% over budget. Sherry Lansing of 20th Century-Fox assured the company's owner-to-be, Marvin Davis, that "there are no Heaven 's Gates here." When Producer Ray Stark was asked what he would do with a self-indulgent director like Cimino, he shot back: "Fire him! Meanwhile, Michelangelo labored to repaint his Sistine Chapel. Five months later, an abridged Heaven's Gate has appeared--with Cimino and U.A. hoping the changes will make a difference.

Well, it's shorter: 75 minutes have been cut. The story makes some sense: one can now see the contours of character conflict that surround Averill, his rival in love, Champion (Christopher Walken), and his rival in war, Canton (Sam Waterston). The story moves, though at wagon-train pace. The climax, a Shootout that ends in disaster for good guys and bad, has dramatic shape and graphic power. The film's coda no longer baffles; it only disappoints.

But in his editing-room sauna, Cimino sweated away Heaven's Gate's one strength: its brazen visual virtuosity. The earlier version was an essay in still life (landscape) and movement (milling crowds). Refracted through smoke and sunlight, young aristocrats dance in an ivied courtyard; peasant families trek to ward the Rockies in a trail of dust and blood; immigrants flood an impromptu Western city, or roller-skate in a grange hall, or die on the plains they had hoped to settle. These images must dominate the film, for they form a vision of the American West as a place too vast and mysterious for man to conquer. They did dominate the long Heaven's Gate; that was its folly and its grandeur. They can still be seen, in postcard glimpses, in the new version. But they are subordinated to a small story, and to Cimino's notion of Hollywood Marxism: the poor are better than the rich because they are more photogenic.

The lesson of Heaven's Gate is clear, Cimino should stop soap-boxing and make a musical--a form that is all movement and no message, with the story told through the songs. As it happens, he is set to direct the film of Evita. So don't cry for Michael Cimino. Through the haze of his handsome failure beckons the ghost of Eva Peron.

--By Richard Corliss. Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

With reporting by Martha Smilgis

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