The interweaving lines of what sounds like a guitar and a trilling mandolin contribute a kind of dusty beauty to the opening moments of this slow sad film which can perhaps best be described as a eulogy and elegy of sorts. Heaven’s Gate charts the protracted death of Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson). Not a physical death, but a ‘death’ in every other sense of the word.

Following the immense success of the Vietnam war epic, The Deer Hunter (1978), director Michael Cimino concentrated on making a Western, a genre whose heyday was clearly over, and whose recent incarnations (The Wild Bunch, [1969], The Ballad of Cable Hogue, [1970], McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971], Buffalo Bill and the Indians [1976] The Shootist [1976]) had been somewhat tender reminisces about a way of life that had forever vanished. In Heaven’s Gate Cimino has chosen as his backdrop the Johnson County War, a tragic struggle between immigrant farmers and livestock owners. He adds a doomed love triangle, and a central character who looses everything that ever meant anything to him. Given these elements it seems fitting that the thematic thrust of Heaven’s Gate is the inevitable passing of all things, and that Cimino spends most of the film’s 3 hour 45 minute running time showing us disintegration: the disintegration of the immigrants’ lives, the disintegration of the Sweetwater township, the disintegration of law and order, and the disintegration of friendships and loves. Though the acting, directing, music, production design and cinematography all contribute, the mood of transience and loss was most strongly conveyed, at least for me, via the narrative.

Heaven’s Gate is structured like a triptych, with the bulk of the story sandwiched between a prologue and epilogue, (both of which have been criticized in the past, the prologue for being too long, the epilogue for being too pointless). Both however, are essential to the articulation of Ciminio’s vision. The extended prologue at Harvard College in 1870 introduces a young eager Jim running late to his graduation parade. He catches the procession, stands beside his best friend Billy (John Hurt), a jovial slightly-foppish fellow, and gives him a hug. The whole scene elicits a sense of hope, a sense of enthusiasm that can’t be contained. Cimino’s expression of this enthusiasm culminates with a large dance in which scores of couples twirl to the rhythms of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz. There is a shot of Jim looking at the woman he loves, and though he doesn’t say it, he seems to feel: "life doesn’t get much better than this." At this point, Cimino abruptly cuts to a shot aboard a dim dust-filled train rattling through Wyoming 20 years later: the camera dollies up to Jim, he is asleep -- when he wakes he doesn’t seem any less tired. Sergio Leone used a similar technique a few years later in his own epic, the 3 hour 49 minute Once Upon a Time in America (1984): a young Noodles is looking at a mirror -- we are then given a close-up of the mirror -- but if this close-up maintains a spacial continuity with the previous shot, the temporal continuity has been somewhat fractured -- when Noodles walks into frame in the close-up, we see that Leone has jumped forward 20 years -- but Noodles isn’t simply older, and appears tired, worn-out, resigned to life. In both films, within a single edit, not only is twenty years elided, years that were perhaps the prime of both protagonists’ lives, but in those twenty years they were changed from young men into middle-aged men whose loneliness and determination offsets their aimlessness and the knowledge that happiness is nothing more for them than a distant dream. They are men who have arrived at a realization of their aloneness in life, and though they might struggle against it, at least for a time, they eventually come to accept it. What happened to Jim in those 20 intervening years we never learn. That is not Cimino’s interest. He wants to show us the end point of those years, the endpoint of lives that are the result of frustrated possibilities and dashed hopes.

This gap in the narrative’s timeline also serves to establish Cimino’s belief that time is a sieve through which life is slowly draining. All Jim has now is memories. A point driven home in the epilogue, one of the film’s most tender scenes. The setting is Newport, Rhode Island, 1903. It is a dusty afternoon. We see a ship, belching black smoke against a hazy sky. Jim stands on deck dressed in white trousers and a Captain’s jacket. He makes his way below deck where a woman, presumably his wife, is asleep. He stares at her for a long time. When she wakes, she asks for a cigarette. He gives her one without speaking a word. She looks at him lovingly, he looks back through a tired worn expression that seems to be all he can muster. Before leaving he turns around and glances at the room, at his wife, and at the objects he finds himself surrounded by. His lower jaw trembles and he seems to be on the verge of crying. The whole scene conveys a simple expression of uncontainable emotion which, when viewed at the end of what is a very emotionally restrained performance from Kristofferson, drives home a final implosion of despair, conveying the state of utter miserableness that hangs about Jim like a storm cloud. A storm cloud that will always hang but can never break.

There are many things about this film worth discussing. Too many to put into a single, fairly short review. I haven’t mentioned Cimino’s visual and acoustic design for example, which clutters the frame and soundtrack to bursting then shifts to scenes marked by their quiet openness and calm, a contrast which expresses something of the conflicting forces at work in many of the film’s protagonists. And I haven’t discussed more minor characters such as Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), a typically tall silent Western man-for-hire who speaks through his gun, but whose character is, over the course of the film, shown to be more tender than we might have imagined, a man who in his final moments surrounded by killers and trapped in a burning house, writes a affectionate final note to his best friend and the woman he loves rather than simply going down with both guns blazing. This is a trajectory which Cimino uses for most of his characters: he first sets up the conventional genre stereotypes, then reveals something unexpectedly idiosyncratic and deeper. And I also haven’t talked about the way Cimino structures scenes and pieces of music to echo other scenes and pieces of music, creating linkages of meaning which function as a cinematic equivalent of rhyming. There’s no doubt that Heaven’s Gate is a rich and complex film which can be analyzed and discussed from multiple vantage points, but it is also overwhelmingly an emotional experience. Tapping into its mood of quiet desolation and decay is all that is needed to appreciate it. Though it was denounced as execrable or praised as brilliant when it first premiered, Heaven’s Gate (whose torturous production and bloated budget is now-legendary and can be placed alongside Apocalypse Now [1979] for sheer excessiveness), screened for merely a week in America before being recalled and heavily edited. It has not been screened in the intervening years. But now, Cimino’s vision of a decaying West, Vilmos Zsigmond’s late-afternoon dust-suffused cinematography, David Mansfield’s nostalgic score, and Kris Kristofferson, John Hurt and Christopher Walken’s beautifully mellow poignant performances, can be viewed as originally intended. Personally, I felt a distinct tingling sensation in the tips of my fingers as the opening credits rolled and Mansfield’s music set the scene for one more trip through Heaven’s Gate.