Fenster writes:
So over on Facebook a friend posts an article from the New York Times suggesting time has been kind to Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. Cimino has gotten his own Final Cut, and is showing off his newly-restored four hour version in Venice. The Times suggests he may also have gotten the last laugh.
Haven’t we heard this all before? Go and Google “Heaven’s Gate” and “masterpiece” and you’ll get over 87,000 hits, with some critic or newspaper or other proclaiming the film was unjustly neglected. None of this is new. Here’s The Guardian in 2005:
Had Heaven’s Gate been directed by Bertolucci or Visconti, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece.
I may well suffer through the four hour version but I suspect I won’t change my mind. I sat through it before, at the New York opening and, along with the rest of the audience, ended up highly perplexed. To me, seeing it on opening night, with high expectations but zero preconceptions, was in interesting experience. As I wrote at 2Blowhards a number of years ago:
Some years back, I was fortunate for a time to have a film critic as a friend and was therefore able to get into some opening night, and pre-opening night, screenings in New York. These were really interesting because they let you approach the film with virtually no preconceptions.
Obviously there was “buzz” to contend with, but at least you didn’t go in with the plot memorized and with a mental crib sheet firmly in place as to what the major reviewers thought. Also, these events gave you an unvarnished look at how the attendees themselves reacted. . .
It was a fascinating experience. I came to the film expecting the best, having fallen head over heels for The Deer Hunter . . .
I recall the intermission, at which the champagne flowed freely, to be extraordinary sociology: all these semi-bigwigs walking around not knowing whether to trust the “buzz” or their own instincts (as the old saying goes “who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”). And to tell the truth, I found myself having the same ambivalent reaction myself–“hmmm, Christopher Walken wearing a ton of makeup in the old West, maybe this is somehow . . . significant????”
So do you plan to see the final final final cut when available?
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
I’d rather watch old Roy Rogers movies.
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Just watch – it’ll only be a matter of time before we start reading stuff like “Ishtar – Neglected Masterpiece?” or “The Love Guru – More Than Meets the Eye?” It’s all part of that “everything you think you know is wrong” crap that the alleged American intelligensia tries to pull every so often to try and get noticed. Historians do it by asserting stuff about gay cowboys and blacks who fought for the Confederacy, food critics do it by hailing barely edible muck from some Third World hellhole as the Next Big Thing for foodies, economists do it by seeing “green shoots” in our current blackened economic landscape, and film critics do it by hailing some piece of over-budget, over-produced dreck as a hidden masterpiece. If “Plan Nine From Outer Space” hasn’t already been hailed as a clever commentary on mid-Cold War Paranoia, it’s only a matter of time…
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Hey – I think ISHTAR IS a neglected masterpiece (Jonathan Rosenbaum and Richard Brody have already written a bunch in its defense). I’m not the world’s biggest fan of “Heaven’s Gate”, but I would personally much rather see pieces that ask us to reassess something that “everybody” thinks is trash (even if “everybody” doesn’t really include everybody) than ones that simply take the given critical consensus at face value. In ISHTAR’s case, the movie (not to mention Elaine May’s career as a director) never recovered from the stories about the inflated budget and Warren Beatty’s behavior on set: it became easy to bash it simply because the well-publicized production problems were too juicy a hook for critics to hang a negative review on.
And I really don’t think most film critics are being disingenuous when they take these contrarian stances. Yes, it may help them stick out from the crowd, which can be a good career move, I guess (a better career move might be to do something else besides being a film critic), but I’m pretty sure most HEAVEN’S GATE lovers really love it.
A bigger problem might be that movie talk – from professional critics or amateur movie buffs – tends to get caught up in unnecessary binaries. I don’t love HEAVEN’S GATE, but it’s a strange, ambitious movie, with many beautiful things in it alongside elements that seem hopelessly, almost comically, misguided. I do love ISHTAR, but some of the things I like best about it – its looseness, its willingness to meander, and the way it’s propelled by the rhythms of the actors rather than by an especially strong sense of plotting – are probably some of the same elements that lead other people to see it as a mess. It’s probably easier to enjoy both movies if we approach them without expecting them to be blow-our-socks-off masterpieces. (Incidentally, a similar issue seems to surround a lot of recent writing on THE MASTER).
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I can’t say that I enjoyed “Ishtar”, but if you did, Sax, more power to you. I personally liked “Sorcerer” which lots of people hated, so there’s no accounting for taste. But I still think that a lot of contrarianism (in every field, not just film criticism) is driven by a desire to stand out from the crowd. Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone who takes a contrarian stand is doing it for that reason.
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I reacted to the original Heaven’s Gate the same way Fenster did — with amazement and disbelief. (Saw it at an early public screening, as Fenster did.) “How much cocaine was consumed on that set?” was the main thought in my brain. I’m not eager to check it out again, though I’m kinda fond of Cimino — what a weird case he is. There are a couple of Ciminos I haven’t watched yet. Thinking about Heaven’s Gate … Maybe I’ll order them up on Netflix.
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I reckon Cimino is one of the weirdest directors ever, and one of the most visually talented. I saw the 4hour ‘Gate’ for the first time on MGM recently, and it’s jaw-droppingly beautiful – and that was on the small screen! As for caring about the characters, well that’s a whole other ball game… I picked up the Final Cut book by Stephen Bach shortly afterwards, which amongst other things revealed how adamant Cimino was over the casting of Isabelle Huppert, a real clanger in my opinion, but I find myself having to admire anyone driven enough to pull off what Cimino pulled off. I mean, flying a movie production across the Atlantic to film in Oxford because the real Harvard University didn’t resemble the Harvard in Cimino’s mind?! I also saw Thunderbolt & Lightfoot again the other night, another idiosyncratic, picturesque oddity, with small-time heist-movie characters dropped into the middle of a vast shimmering rocky mountain landscape. And a US flag pops up every ten minutes or so… Weird! But there’s no doubt for me that Cimino has a unique eye for detail, and for movement and violence.
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I like Toddy Cat’s rant about contrarians. That plus the trope of enjoying things “ironically” is the meat and potatoes in the hipster diet.
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