by The Fluffer
We come here tonight to praise Heaven’s Gate, not to bury it.
First of all, we’d like to say… we know, we know. Yes, the budget was far too big. Yes, Michael Cimino was a wanker. Yes, John Hurt’s speech makes no sense, United Artists management was too weak, it goes too long, and there’s too much roller skating. We don’t deny any of that.
And yet…
Now time has passed and we’re not whipped up in the hysteria of the time (as the slack-jawed critics were), and there’s distance from the stock-film-bro-crap take (“Man it was the studio’s fault they released it not ready, the studio, the studio, man I hate the studio”), and our blockbusters are now predominantly comic book pieces full of quips, CGI and stars riddled with Ozempic and steroids… you can enjoy Heaven’s Gate through new eyes.
The movie looks wonderful. It always did of course, but even more now that they don’t make films like that anymore. All (well, a lot of) that money is up there on screen – every picture is like a painting.
It’s an easy story to follow. Not complex. Isabelle Huppert is captivating. The love triangle between Chris Walken, her and Kris Kristofferson works a treat. Walken is amazing. The support cast is incredibly strong (Sam Waterson, Jeff Bridges).
There is the novelty (now) of a huge budget studio picture being so relentlessly anti-big business, pro-immigrant, anti-government and bleak – Huppert and Bridges are killed pointlessly at the end just to make us feel especially bad. Yes, that’s part of the reason the film did poorly at the box office (at least in The Deer Hunter, Robert de Niro still got the girl) but time has passed and we can appreciate the left wing politics that only seem to come from spoilt middle class kids who made a fortune in advertising before going into movies.
And on the subject of Cimino … for so long, we’ve watched Heaven’s Gate through a specific prism (the Napoleonic egomaniac who met his Waterloo in the movie)… but watching it in 2025, we have an entirely fresh appreciation of the director. Because Cimino was trans. Yes, true, this hasn’t been entirely confirmed, so an asterisk has to be put on top of that observation, but the evidence is fairly strong.
And knowing this, makes one re-appreciate Cimino’s entire oeuvre, especially the themes/moments that keep recurring: the female lead being sexually assaulted, the fact that none of the male and female characters seem to enjoy having sex with each other, the constant questioning of and depiction of masculinity, the love stories between the male characters, the loving way the men are framed compared to the women. All this and more features in Heaven’s Gate, which is particularly noticeable for Cimino’s clear crush on Kris Kristofferson. We’re not saying this means Cimino was X, Y or Z, but we are saying people are complex.
For far too long, the mystique of Heaven’s Gate has been caught up in film bro culture – Egos! Cocaine! Studio! Perfectionism! There’s actually a hell of a lot more going on. Give it another look.
