It's certainly not a complex "narrative" with multiple plot lines, but I don't think that's necessarily a flaw. Westerns are defined by simple, sparse narratives, from Ford to Mann to Boetticher. There are certanly exceptions, but the complexity of Westerns derive from the ambiguity and potency of their "simple" stories, not from narrative overload. Only with Altman and Peckinpah did you begin to see more "sprawl" in narrative. And even then, the "sprawl" are largely digressions; the actual "plots" of McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid are actually deceptively simple. Heaven's Gate, being not just a post-Ford Western, but also a post-Peckinpah Western, tries to collapse the two: this is a filmmaker who wants to believe in the mythic simplicity of the Classical Western, but can't ignore that violence and confusion of the Revisionist Western. One can argue that most Westerns are rarely more than two-hours, sure. But to do that, you have to identify what Heaven's Gate "wastes" time on. To your credit, you've done that. Although I disagree on all fronts:
1)The Prologue: One of the two major linchpins for critics of the film (we'll get to the second): "All this sequence does is tell us that Jim and Irvine were college buddies and that Jim had a college sweetheart." This is entirely incorrect, it tells us much more. It in fact establishes the entire tone of Averill and Irvine's generation: representing, as they do, the elites of the country, they were the generation that finally tamed the west, and made great profits off of it. The sequence can be defined by largely four movements: 1) The Reverend Doctor's Speech; 2) Billy Irvine's speech; 3) The Blue Danube Waltz; 4) The Tree Rush on Harvard's Liberty Tree/Rebellion Tree. Which is to say 1) A speech extolling that this generation use their education to educate a growing nation 2) A cynical, ironic speech which in its glibness completely refutes the former notion, and establishes both Irvine and his generation's future in the American West, 2) The first of the film's many circles, around which the entire film is structured on, representing togetherness, community, affluency, success... that is, the American Dream. 3) The film's second circle, and like all the following, it flows from, comments on, and contradicts the first one; in the ceremonial scrambling for flowers, already does the Harvard generation - the society they represent, the ideals they are meant to promote - show signs of violence and ruthlessness. At the end of the ceremony, Irvine perceptively notes that "It's all over"... all the optimism and great plans that this class has are about to come tumbling down
2) The Cockfight: I don't understand how this "drags"; it's a very short scene which isn't nearly as long as a dozen others in the film that go unmentioned. Averill shares some important exposition with John Bridges, then he breaks up the fight. That's it. But more importantly, the cockfight ring is another of the film's important circles, and it's another cross-section of the film's important themes: community, money, violence, human exploitation, business. Cimino wants to believe in a Fordian sense of community, of the great democratic society where everyone can participate regardless of race, creed or religion... but he also recognizes the reality is much more difficult. Johnson County here is both brought together in a communal event, but one that mirrors their own degradation, and their own ability for infighting, and that this immigrant "utopia" that Averill wants so badly to believe in is itself already splintering even prior to the war. This goes equally for Bridges, who is both a member of the community and an entrepreneur; who is both providing them with entertainment and a place of community, but also exploiting them with booze and gambling. Cimino's love for the community is not unconditional; he recognizes their foibles.
3) The Dance: As with the opening graduation ceremony and the final battle, this is probably one of the three most important scenes of the film, representing as it does one of the three most significant circles in the film. Here, despite their infighting, the immigrant community is brought together as a community, one that mirrors the Eastern Upper-Class one of Harvard, that is, the very ideal for which the immigrants came to America for. But it's a different circle: this is not the popular music of the European aristocracy, but the folk music of the American melting-potl; the Harvard circle was graceful, organized, precise (representing the exclusivity of the Eastern elites), this circle is loose, frantic, but arguably more joyous (representing that community's own inclusivity); that dance revolved around the Harvard Liberty Tree, representing the deep, firm roots of this own elite class, almost an American "aristocracy"; this dance revolves around a stove, a symbol of industrialization, of steam and coal power, of the very forces that'll drive the "Old World" America of the East into the "New World" of the West. And it stages the scene for the final battle, which is essentially these two circles trying to destroy and devour another (and note that the battle is encircled around a tree, like the Liberty Tree, almost as if the mercenary are trying to protect it from the immigrants; they are trying to prevent them from infiltrating their entrenched, exclusive, prosperous society).
4) The First Battle: Yes, the battle is a mess. No, it is not pointless. The fact that it is a mess is the point. They are so eager to fight, but clearly understimate what it takes to do so. And they suffer from it. As many people seem to get hurt from simple accidents as gunfire. And Averill isn't shaving because he wants to look good. He's shaving because he's undecided, he still doesn't know whether he should give a damn about this conflict. If you don't understand this, I question whether you were paying attention. The immigrants need Averill to organize them, Averill needs to immigrants to fight back against the society that he's rejected. This first battle is a rough draft for what's to come later. And yes, Irvine gets shot. That's the irony of it all. Irvine refuses to take a stand: he knows what the Association is doing is wrong (he invokes the Indian genocide), but he doesn't do anything, he thinks drunken apathy is a substitute for making a tough moral stand (as do most people). And as such, he's the first to fall in the battle. And his last line ("I wish I was in Paris") is another key to the film: the Harvard class of 1870 went two directions - towards the "Old World" of Europe (escaping deeper into their own aristocratic elitism) or towards the "New World" of the West (trying to establish that elitism there). It makes it clear that while the American Myth is one of a classless society free from the hierarchy of Europe, that this hierarchy has in fact been recreated here. There is nothing more verboten in American culture that truly representing the elite strata of American society. We're obsessed with the rich, but it's the nouveau rich, the celebrity rich, the political rich: we try to ignore and hide that upper class segment of society that lives like royalty, with tremendous wealth and power, and that has been doing so for generations, some leading back to prior to the Revolution. Cimino's Johnson County War is a chapter in America's hidden class war.
5) The Epilogue: the other lynchpin for critics, but once again, another significant scene, and the only logical ending to the film. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, defeated, Averill escapes into his wealth, into Newport (the ostentatious town which is perhaps the great symbol of his generation's financial success). The yacht, the wife, all the pomp and wealth... it's nothing more than a tomb for something that was lost in Johnson County, the very American Dream which the country is built on, and for Averill himself, who is spiritually dead at this point. Not only would the film lose something if the prologue and epilogue were cut, the film would in fact lose all meaning.
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14 years ago
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ramses_22
14 years ago
I appreciate the effort you put into your post and you did shed some light on some things but I still stand by my belief that the beginning and end could have been cut. You say the Harvard scene shows the generation Jim belonged to and yet it doesn't show who Jim is. He hardly says anything during that part so the audience has no clue what sort of man he is.
What caused him to go down a different moral path than his classmates? What happened during that 20 year time frame is a complete mystery. I assumed that he married his college girlfriend, she later died, he then falls in love with an immigrant prostitute. The ending shows that his wife was still alive but he clearly no longer loved her. Where was she during all of this? What exactly is Jim's job? Where did all of his money come from? Despite it's length this movie is seriously lacking in character development.
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bstephens21
14 years ago
Once again, I think this is to ignore some things about the film:
This is a film that is about community, about social forces in flux and conflict, and the role of the individual is subordinated to those social forces. This is why it is in fact quite a radical and challenging genre piece. The Western genre (propelled by the Western Myth) is perhaps the major Individualist genre: Cimino takes the genre, and challenges its notion of "the lone, righteous male", diminishing its mythic significance in the face of the major social forces that truly carved out the American West. We see Kris Kristofferson plays a Sheriff, and we expect the iconic lawmen of the Classical Western - John Wayne in Rio Bravo, Gary Cooper in High Noon, Randolph Scott in Seven Men from Now - who single-handedly tame the West through moral strength and divine justification. But Cimino is rejecting that; his sheriff is just a man adrift in a social landscape which dwarfs him as much as the physical landscape. And his first step in this is destroying the mythic autonomy and self-reliance of the Western Hero: the Classical Western hero is always a character that doesn't seem developed so much as conjured. He appears as if he was pushed out of the open earth fully formed, born already with a horse, saddle, hat and gun. Cimino's first step is to show that his hero, like the American West, is not mythic, but in fact created by the very civilized forces of Eastern and European society that existed prior to Westward Expansion. His sheriff is not the stranger on horseback who appears as mysteriously as he rides away at the end; he is an educated, affluent Harvard industrialist who "plays" at being a rugged and stoic man of the west. Kristofferson is our lead because he's the eyes of the audience: a man who wants to truly believe in the Western Myth, but must face up to its true nature.
You say the opening ignores James Averill: but James Averill can only be first understood through his class. You say the movie doesn't give reasons for his withdrawal from the upper-class: but the entire film's narrative trajectory explicates the very elements that forced him to reject his class. It is explicated in his increased estrangement with the "utopian" immigrant community, as he begins to recognize that they themselves are beginning to imitate the civilized society that he hoped to escape. You say that it doesn't give a clue as to what he does and how he get there: but his short standoff at the Stock Grower's Club House, when he's reminded he was once a member, hints at an entire backstory for those who know their history. This is obviously a guy who went West as a capitalist and an investor, who quite easily made quite a bit of money as such, who was probably appointed as Sheriff as a result of these connections, but who slowly came to reject his class in the face of this "mythic" utopia. Does it provide specific hows-and-whys? No, but this is to miss the point. To answer these would be to individualize the film past the point where it could still sustain its thesis. Does knowing what happen to his "college sweetheart" tell us any more about Averill's lovelife than what we see in his reluctance to marry Ella? Does knowing the specific event that made him reject his class make the final eradication of the county any more palatable or any less terrible? Does knowing the entire story, word-by-word, about Nate and Averill's relationship change the present state of their awkward deep-friendship/rivalry that they find themselves in as mirror images? And we do know what happened in those twenty years... we know it from the films of Ford, Mann, Peckinpah, Leone, Penn, Altman, where we saw the Myth of the West examined and slowly chipped away... and in the entire current of American culture from the end of the WWII to the end of the 70s, where we saw an entire society go from blind faith in itself to self-loathing and disillusionment. The "character development" that you and so many people ask for are ultimately redundancies that don't change the essential character of this film, which presents a vision of an ideal America, which itself perhaps never existed, and watches it as it is demolished from without and within. And only by understanding why the film must diminish Averill's significance in the crowd in the beginning can you understand why it's just as logical and inevitable that it does the exact opposite at the end: only at the end of the film can we understand what it means to be a man alone, without a class or community.
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14 years ago
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bstephens21
12 years ago
That's only if you follow the fallacy that films are only about the propulsion of plot, in which case why bother making movies? Won't a paragraph synopsis suffice?
Giving a subject its perfect and most precise visual representation... That's what true movie-making is about. That's what this movie has in spades, and which it would sadly lose if you hacked off the epilogue and prologue.
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12 years ago
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bstephens21
12 years ago
The skating rink sequence doesn't work without the opening waltz as a counterpoint! You're ignoring just how crucial the notions of society and ritual are to the film.
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12 years ago
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bstephens21
12 years ago
You're acting like the opening is just a lot of dead air, with a few pieces of pretty dancing thrown in. Each piece of the twenty minute segment has its function, has something to say, has an interplay with one another and an interplay with the rest of the film.
1) The march into the hall, showing the Harvard class as highly ritualized and mannered, with all the pomp and careful ceremony of an aristocratic court... and that's a key element to the film: the notion of the American Aristocracy. But, just as they say you can't prove a negative, the problem comes up on how to show an absence. That's why the film needs to open at Harvard, needs to close at Newport, but needs to violently break with both milieus for the rest of its running time. The opening and closing are incongruent. But they're incongruent by design, just as this Aristocratic social order is incongruent to pioneer spirit we associate with the West... and with America. And that's ultimately what the bookends do to the film: it opens the film up to a wider context. When the "aristocracy" finally encroaches violently on Sweetwater, we know its not simply another range war, but something much more troubling in the American fabric stretching backwards and forwards in time beyond the confines of just the West.
2) The two speeches always get short-shifted, but to me both are exactly key to everything that comes forth: Cotten beckoning the class of '70 (an important year, just as 1903 is for the epilogue) to use their limitless possibilities for a higher purpose, only to be refuted flippantly by the class valedictorian... the same flippancy that allows him to stand by and watch something he finds horrifying happen all around him (A worthy theme, I feel: it is an abundance of this intellectual and moral impotency that allows any atrocity to happen, far more so than the outright aggression of those who conduct said atrocities). If anything, John Hurt's character completely falls apart without this opening.
And can we please quit using the supposed "inaudibility" to bash each and any passage from the film. This is hardly the conversation by the train tracks later in the film. In even the worst VHS copy of the film, the two speeches are perfectly audible.
3) The Harvard Waltz the first of the film's many circle... and the idea that its a weak conceit is laughable. The Circles ARE the film, and without them the film lacks any and all narrative order and falls apart. To me the various circles represent perfect cinema, the ability to find a succinct, exact visual image for the ideas and emotions of a film. Society, community, class, war, peace... there all apparent, at their most harmonious and destructive, in Cimino's circle. It's here that Cimino truly shows his genius, creating a cinema in a grand tradition reaching back, not just towards European masters like Visconti and Ophuls, but all the way back to the wholly American epics of Ford and Griffith: people weren't still making films like this anymore in 1980. They sure as hell aren't right now.
4) The Liberty Tree run, the film's second circle, and one that acts as much of a counterpoint as Irvine's speech does for the Reverend Doctor. It's the underbelly, the sleeping beast of all the pomp and pretension of the opening ceremonies, the first sign of how swiftly it can descend into violence. It clearly demonstrates what the later film will repeat, the way all that ritual and ceremony can easily become militarized and destructive. With that said, Cimino also doesn't sell it short for what it is: one last revellous hurrah for a society that's about to step out of youth and essentially inherit the world, and all that troubling responsibility it entails. As Irvine presciently realizes: "It's all over!" The Class of '70 will be tasked with closing the Western frontier, to violently forge the 20th century out of the remnants of the 19th. Heaven's Gate is as much their story as it is the immigrants (which is why it is Kristofferson - himself a son of privilege who threw it all away for his own self-fashioned bohemianism - and not Jeff Bridges who is the hero).
It's interesting you mention Kubrick, because his modular/episodic films are precisely those I can barely watch anymore. Every segment in 2001 and Clockwork Orange just strike me as being just "there". They're barebone, they say exactly what they want to say, then move on. Some people might see narrative economy in that, but I find it stifling and oppressive. A film needs to live and breathe and wash over you and suck you in and feel like a living world which you've been simply privileged a glimpse into. It's not a mistake that Kubrick's most ostentatious film is his best: Barry Lyndon.
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bstephens21
14 years ago
Finally had the chance to see this in 35mm this week, and I really want to officially call b--s--t on all those who get confused about who the girl is in the end. The picture of her and Averill figures prominently throughout the film, to the point that we shouldn't have any doubt who the girl in the picture is. And in the ending, Cimino goes out of the way to put this very same picture clearly in the middle of Averill and the girl when they're finally seen together again.
Some notes:
The transfer and sound mix on the old DVD, other than simply not being very high quality, do seem to be in fact rather faithful to the film. One glaring change: many people note that there's the one shot in the roller-skate scene where Jeff Bridges exits the dancehall and vomits, and the color scheme suddenly turns sepia. In this print, the scene rather suddenly shifted in fact a few moments earlier, and stayed that way throughout the scene, right through Ella/Avery's waltz and their stroll towards the lake. In fact, this was done so conspicuously I'm almost willing to guess that someone made a mistake printing the 35mm, and applied the scheme to the rest of the scene. At least I hope this isn't what Cimino intended all along, since the version we know works much better and logically. I guess we'll have to wait for the upcoming Blu-Ray to know for sure.
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Tassadar_K
14 years ago
After reading the above I felt like I had to drop a line here to thank bstephens21 for taking the time to write it and shine light for everyone that is confused about this movie. In my view, it definitely is not the "greatest movie ever made" (if there even is such a thing) but one of those movies that have tried to break conventions about moviemaking and storytelling, move them one step forward and partially failed because the main target audience was neither prepared, nor willing to appreciate it at that time. I'm not even going to start the talk about how all the critics were dismissing and slamming it because it went over budget and a studio went bankrupt and not for its artistic value, or the non-existence of it.
Of course the movie has its flaws, which I find especially in the horrible editing (when you have to cut down 200 hours of footage to just under 4, I guess this is the downside...), bad sound which makes some dialogues uncomprehensible, lack of depth of characters and some others, but I would only like to "defend" it a little bit from some of the generalized attacks. Everyone complains that there is not enough development of characters in this movie, that we cannot empathize with them, that there's no storytelling, the scenes are overly long and boring... well, that is exactly the point of the entire movie and the much different approach it proposes. There are no heroes, there are no true villains, everyone has good and bad parts, each character is just a person trying to make a living the best way he can (like in real life). Most of the times, the scenes depict common daily life scenes, nothing exceptional going on, long pauses and silences in the dialogue, characters just staring at one another (another point for which it's being slammed)... again, it just wants to depict real life, where you dont always have the perfect line ready or the mood to talk for 5 minutes without stopping, like actors' monologues are, where you dont see bank robberies or gunfights quite every hour. And yes the famed battle scene is dirty, muddy and somewhat lacks sense - again, like so many real battles have been fought: in the dirt, in the mud and without much thinking involved. This entire bleakness and apparent lack of relationship of the viewers with the characters is an integral part of the movie which, for me, has been the main reason that I reviewed it a few times and loved it for what it tried to achieve. I admit it's not for everyone and many will get utterly bored because the characters don't scream "like me!" or "hate me!".
I'm glad to see that someone else identified the circle theme appearing all over the movie, it is one of the most important elements keeping it together. While the previous post explains it through togetherness and community, I would go as far as interpret it as Cimino's way of showing life coming full circle and the endless cycles that it then repeats. It is a subtle but most important theme.
Perhaps the most overlooked and underrated scene of the movie is the Epilogue on the yacht. I see it as the most important and masterfully shot of them all, where we get a glimpse of Cimino's spark of genius; the silence and stillness of it is mesmerizing. It concludes once and for all that most people will choose the comfort of a safe and rich, but dull life rather than risk breaking the social conventions. Averill finally conforms with the societal demands and returns to his "class", without being able to change anything in the structure of the society and being too weak to keep trying. It does not matter what happened in the last 20 years, it is not relevant; the only thing that's relevant is the bitter ending conclusion: the poor will do the fighting and dieing, while the upper class will have their yachts, cigarettes and juicy fruit bowls.
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askmonroville
11 years ago
I picked up on the comparable circular movements of the characters, but the added points increased my appreciation of this film (much as Rob Ager's CollativeLearning.com has increased my respect for a lot of Kubrick's films, specifically THE SHINING).
I think if there was one scene I would cut, it would be when John and Ella are murdered by Canton. They could have easily ended the massacre with Averill riding away back to the East, with John wandering aimlessly as one of the few survivors. With the epilogue, I could have easily seen Averill's teary apathy due to the points you made, as well as (with the scene above removed) his regret for leaving Ella and his life in the West behind.
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plexus61
11 years ago
Exactly because of the scene I gave the movie 9/10 (instead of 10/10). Unnecessary and, let me say, goofy episode.
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frodo_unplugged
11 years ago
thank you for this post even if it's over two years old now, it's one of the few posts on heere that I've actually read from top to bottom and it's spot on!
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PoppyTransfusion
11 years ago
I find the points you raise - bstephens - to be eloquent and apposite. Clearly you're familiar with the film too. I appreciate that you mention how Cimino undermines many of the expectations one has of a Western and, given this, Kristofferson was a good choice for the role of Jim Averill. Nonetheless the film could have been edited better and shots that linger for a long time could be reduced without minimising their significance.
The distance is nothing. The first step is the hardest.
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