As the last gasp of New Hollywood, the disastrous release of Heaven’s Gate marks the exact point in cinematic history when the Glorious Nihilism of the 1970s suddenly gave way to the Hedonistic Excess of the 1980s. Lord knows what compelled the young, hip executives at United Artists to spend a then scandalous $44 million on an epic, downbeat “Anti-Western” about the plight of Eastern European immigrants in Wyoming, but the end result is nowhere near as disastrous as its reputation suggests. Heaven’s Gate is a handsomely mounted, engrossing epic that demands a great deal of patience from the viewer and doles out ample rewards for those who endure its considerable running time.

Much like its spiritual predecessor, 1978′s critically lauded The Deer Hunter, there is a significant amount of pomp and circumstance before we are transported to the gritty immediacy of the untamed frontier. It’s perfectly understandable to be put off by the glacially paced Harvard graduation ceremony comprising the first 20 odd minutes of the film; we’re introduced to salt-of-the-earth protagonist Kris Kristofferson and his intellectual buddy John Hurt, the protagonist’s soon-to-be-forgotten lady love, and about 500 other anonymous souls who appear only during this extended sequence. One of these fleeting presences is that of old Hollywood stalwart Joseph Cotten,  his career well into its irreversible downward spiral; he fittingly delivers some muttered dialogue before vanishing altogether during a scene where John Hurt delivers a speech derived from Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” ethos in front of  hundreds of extras packed into an auditorium. The 2.20:1 widescreen ably packs in detail during this and the following dance-in-the-round, which would be more thrilling if it wasn’t choreographed to Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz, a piece of music that will forever be associated with Stanley Kubrick and the space station docking in 2001.

While that musical choice may have been ill-advised, the brass band playing The Battle Hymn of the Republic while graduating students toss countless top hats in the air suggests a sinister subtext to the ceremony: these kids are newly minted warriors marching off to a commencement address (where John Hurt educates them about Manifest Destiny and “striving for excellence”) before going to fight their own wars. Be it the Industrial Revolution or Westward Expansion, America was going through some violent change in the late 19th century. As expansive as this sequence is, it’s still marred by quite a few editorial blemishes. There must have been a great deal cut out with Cotten and Kristofferson’s paramour, since even in Cimino’s director’s cut (the only acceptable presentation of Heaven’s Gate until the fabled 5 1/2 hour preview cut sees the light of day) there are meaningful glances exchanged with significant characters who don’t ever reappear, people introduced who have no part to play later on. During yet another strange ritual, John Hurt is beaten down by a rowdy mob while Kristofferson rises to retrieve a thrown object from a tree, then is hoisted upon various shoulders and borne away. Perhaps some explanatory material was excised, but the shoulder hoisting serves as an intriguing transitional cue.

There’s a graceful slow dissolve from the hero’s brief moment of glory on the Harvard campus, being carried off as a champion of the  Class of 1870 while his ladylove watches from a high window, to a much older Kristofferson in a train car as he awakens from an alcoholic stupor while beams of light pierce the smoky interior. Welcome to Heaven. There’s an awful lot of storytelling done here without using any dialogue: the look he gives to the conductor when the train stops at his destination says volumes without anyone saying a damn thing. The glory days are gone with the wind, much like his Harvard lady and his youthful idealism; 22 years of joy have vanished with alarming efficiency. Natch, the only solace to be found comes in a bottle or a flask. When it comes time to exit the train, Kris is too drunk to stand upright.

Somehow he makes it off without sustaining serious injury, and we’re in the Old West, and buddy, it sure as hell deserves to be capitalized. Every dollar of the film’s enormous budget is on screen, from the lush Harvard greens to a dusty brown Montana town built from the ground up. This isn’t your generic backlot frontier village with the single saloon, the barbershop, the hotel, and a handful of denizens. These streets are PACKED with extras. Literally teeming with activity. People clogging the avenues like insects, blocking the passage of horse-drawn carriages. It’s Johnson County, 1892, at the height of a population boom, and you don’t doubt it for a second.

No Western is complete without a Prostitute with a Heart of Gold, and while it may be a purely cinematic invention, an inherent fallacy, French cupcake Isabelle Huppert and her wonderful derrirere are more than up to the task of giving some small amount of pleasure to Grizzled Lawman Kris. She’s on some sort of extended loan from the local brothel madam, and she wants nothing more than to go off with her boyfriend to greener pastures. But there’s a big big problem that needs sorting out first. A problem that just happens to come with a mustache and a dapper wardrobe.

Who better to play a dastardly yet weirdly sympathetic villain than Chris Walken? He has one hell of a great introduction, too. The scene initially follows humble Mr. Kovacs, a Ukranian immigrant farmer, as he bickers with his wife and teaches his son how to butcher a flank of beef. Then there’s an ominous silence, followed by muted footsteps and a sinister shadow falling across a sheet hung up on a clothesline. Kovacs’ confused cries are met only by a mysterious cocking sound, and then BOOM!! A hole opens up in the sheet, introducing Walken, and a hole opens up in Kovacs’ torso, introducing him to the Great Beyond.  Our farmer becomes little more than another slab of meat, juxtaposed against butchered beef as his freshly minted widow howls curses at the heavens while Walken’s walkin’ off.

Chris may be a bastard, but he’s only a tool motivated by a considerable bounty on certain Eastern European immigrants. Farmer Kovacs is just one of around 150 names on a “death list” prepared by Sam Waterston and his gang of rich landowning Honky buddies. Taking Kipling’s message to heart, the conspiracy is set up to eliminate “undesirables” who are mostly honest family men lumped in with a handful of small-time cattle rustlers. Under the guise of law and order, the foreigners who do all the hard work are eliminated while the white men roll in to clean up the mess created by their own hired guns. Ingenious, and ironic too, since these white men are descended from immigrants themselves.

One of Cimino’s pet obsessions has to do with the exploitation of immigrants and the self-serving absurdity of American foreign policy; the Russian steelworking community aiding an unjust war in The Deer Hunter, for example, or Mickey Rourke’s impassioned speech about Chinese immigrants building the Transcontinental Railroad in the otherwise mediocre Year of the Dragon. Here, the immigration issue takes center stage, providing the bulk of the action and conflict against this sprawling Western canvas. When the immigrants aren’t being slain outright, they’re struggling to get by without the aid of horses or 20th century technology. Yet they manage.

The bits of enjoyment these farming communities can take away from endless days of toil and casual discrimination can be found at the local church, the eponymous Heaven’s Gate, where after preacher Brad Dourif pounds the pulpit for a while, the seats are cleared and the arena is converted into a skating rink. There’s plenty of song and dance and drink to be had, but for some adults-only fun there’s the brothel or the cockfighting pit behind Jeff Bridges’ bar. The Dude himself, skillfully switching between a Russian dialect and his usual Southern Californian English, throws his own cock in the ring and manages to win by spewing alcohol in its face. Yes, this is the same Michael Cimino who somehow came up with the trunk full of rabbits in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which also features Bridges in drag for most of its bizarre third act. Bridges similarly acts as sidekick here, an unofficial deputy aiding in the land wars. Sadly he does not utilize his cockfighting skills at a later point.

Does the profile at the right of the frame look familiar? Sure enough, it’s Willem Dafoe hanging out in the background of the cockfight. Perhaps he has money riding on one of these cocks, or perhaps his nameless immigrant enjoys the communal promotion of grisly fowl-on-fowl violence. Don’t worry, cock lovers: these fights aren’t nearly as graphic or prolonged as those in Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter, although there is a distinct lack of Warren Oates for which Cimino’s film suffers slightly. Kristofferson was also born to perform in Westerns, and his previous work with Sam Peckinpah might have prepared him for this turbulent shoot. When Sherriff Kris comes in to settle a dispute, his thousand-yard glare is way more intimidating than either his speech or his holstered six-shooters. Needless to say, Willem Dafoe manages to upstage him just by looking bemused in the background.

A veritable rogue’s gallery of supporting characters adds plenty of flavor to the Western milieu, as if the lavish production design already didn’t assure complete historical authenticity. As a result, the narrative thrust of Heaven’s Gate is burdened with at least a dozen subplots and unnecessary characters that do little but distract from the main storyline that leisurely oscillates between Kris and Chris vying for the affections of Isabelle Huppert and the impending Johnson County War. There may be some ancient Hollywood rule that mandates saddling every sweeping historical epic with that most despised of literary devices: the love triangle.

Besides making this overstuffed film even more so, the scenes with Walken awkwardly romancing Huppert don’t exactly ring true, and there is little to occupy the viewer’s interest outside of Huppert’s wildly darting eyes as she internally struggles with her competing affections. Walken offers impulsive adventure, Kristofferson offers stability as well as some damn good country/western guitar skills. Who to choose? Who to decide? Who to care? Huppert obligingly strips her garments whenever possible, but this isn’t enough to make up for a shoddily written character whose only decisions are made for her, and whose sole proactive decision is laughable at best, suicidal at worst. But she looks great in period garb, that much is undeniable.

The tension that unexpectedly builds up during Walken’s visit to the cathouse comes not from the romantic entanglements but rather from whether or not he’s gonna put a hole in the skull of an immigrant John who pays for sexual favors with stolen livestock. Likewise, you don’t really buy his relationship with Kristofferson, which always toes the line between begrudging tolerance and out-and-out animosity, which we suspect was rooted in an earlier time when they roamed the frontier as bounty hunters. Which would have made for a very interesting story on its own, but it’s just a barely-remarked-upon detail in the hugely ambitious Heaven’s Gate. Walken will always and forever be the creepiest film actor since the much less prolific Max Schreck.

Truth be told, the film takes an awful long time to congeal and tighten up. Cimino’s incomparable sense of time and place takes a backseat to economical pacing; long stretches are devoted to nothing but mood and atmosphere, with Vilmos Zsigmond’s gorgeous location photography supplying equal amounts of stunning vistas and stunningly brown interiors. One scene, where Kristofferson drags a drunken Jeff Bridges out of the skating rink, is so brown that it’s strongly reminiscent of the sepia-toned photography of the silent era, with plenty of grain to validate the comparison. We’ve got every shade of brown you could imagine in this film, perhaps as a result of overused tints or color gels. There was no browner place than Wyoming in 1892, that much is for sure. Outside the town, colors are decidedly more naturalistic. Once Waterston and his crew arrive via train and hit the ground with horses at full gallop, there’s a jaw-droppingly beautiful shot of John Hurt drunkenly lamenting “What have we become?” before seemingly disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

Following a necessary intermission, Cimino tightens the screws with a vengeance. Waterston’s gang blows away Ukranians with zealous ferocity, Sheriff Kris informs the surviving immigrants of the vendetta, the townsfolk begin to gather arms, Deputy Jeff takes up arms and watches coldly as the damned love triangle finally resolves itself with Walken issuing an ultimatum to the Sheriff, to which the only response is another slug of Old Rotgut.

Sam Waterston’s underused uppity villain doesn’t get nearly enough screen time, and the character is another sloppily written Western archetype in what is supposed to be a mythical deconstruction of the genre. What self-respecting oater doesn’t have some rich asshole wearing black and twirling his mustache, usually while tying some helpless woman to a set of railroad tracks? In this instance, the sexless villain is given but a handful of scenes to explain his simplistic motivation, and one scene to demonstrate his dedication to the cause. Human life has no value to the conspiratorial landowning Whites, but we already knew that from decades of John Wayne programmers. Since the ruthless native tribes had already been death-marched away to reservations by 1892, the landowners have little to do but take the place of marauding rebel Indian Nations. The only difference is their skin tone and aversion to scalping.

Yet the scene where Walken strides into Waterston’s tent and calls him out for being a pussy is downright chilling for the direct savagery of the response to Walken’s challenge. “Have you ever taken a life?” he asks, as if he already knows the answer. Then, with psychopathic haste, Waterston executes a nearby hostage at point-blank range, then tosses the gun to a nearby Lieutenant who just happens to be played by Terry O’ Quinn (with almost a full head of hair!). Even the amoral Walken is disturbed.

Soon afterward, Walken has tried to pierce together some semblance of a peaceful existence, but even he doesn’t seem to buy this sudden transformation, to say nothing of the audience. Most suspiciously, he’s locked up in a tiny cabin with Mickey Rourke and a creepy man who constantly eats baked beans, with newspaper cutouts serving as wallpaper. It would be kind of chic to have this kind of interior design today, but back then it was kind of tacky. Nonetheless, Walken’s far-ahead-of-his-time sense of home decoration, coupled with his roommates and rather strong attachment to Kristofferson, suggest his character is confused about more than his morality. The cruel twists of fate that conspire to give him a well deserved screwing over don’t supply nearly enough pathos to convince us of his “redemption”. However you may interpret what ultimately happens, his final confrontation with Waterston’s gang is a pretty great action sequence. But Mickey Rourke inspires a hell of a lot more sympathy with just a few short lines of dialogue and a mournful look he gives his roommate at a pivotal point.

Heaven’s Gate dedicates much of its third act to prolonged battle set pieces, massive in scope and scale, even more massive in the budgetary department. Brad Dourif, as the minister turned ad hoc general, barks orders with his broken English and converts his congregation to unarmed infantry and, somehow, is able to construct half a dozen mobile wooden shields with the foreknowledge of their usefulness in the upcoming seige of Waterston’s mercenaries. With this logic gap attributed to some of the excised footage (the battle scene was originally 90 minutes long!), there’s still plenty of ridiculous superhuman feats. How and why Huppert survives her carriage ride is a question best left to God, or more pointedly, the writer/director who suffered from no small Messianic complex.

With countless horses riding in circles around a massed group of gunmen trapped in a square, it’s quite difficult to discern some important details in the battle. Namely who is firing at whom, whose horse is falling over, which bearded hero is murdering which mustachioed mercenary, which immigrant infantryman or woman is being shot.  Through the haze, the only bits of identifiable information consist of Jeff Bridges repeatedly screaming “GET DOWN!!!” and the makeshift army failing to heed these orders. Meanwhile Kristofferson lays waste to innumerable Honkys without suffering any sort of injury, a literal Wrath of God. Thankfully there are some choice wide shots that remove us from the fracas and minimize the struggle with a literal God’s Eye View.

There’s a development that would be considered deus ex machina if it somehow removed the heroes from a tricky predicament, but in this context it’s something much more devious. In spite of an inexplicable epilogue aboard a steamship, the ending of Heaven’s Gate packs a wallop. It’s an unfiltered shot of 200-proof whiskey straight to your eyeballs, as unforgettable as it is devastating. Those who died were indeed the lucky ones. Cimino’s overall vision, while still slightly compromised, comes through with crystal clarity. American “foreign policy” has always and forever been influenced by the industrial forces behind its government, and Conservative xenophobia always starts at home. But where is home, exactly? Who or what decided our standing in our respective social castes? Is it possible to rise above our preordained destinies? Was Kipling right when he wrote “White Man’s Burden”, or was he just laying the foundation for Conservative groupthink? Can the failure of one film truly be responsible for the sudden death of the most glorious cinematic era in American history? Did Michael Cimino get a raw deal, or did United Artists?

Enough rhetorical questions. Heaven’s Gate doesn’t answer any of them, but perhaps Cimino’s overambitious epic will improve in stature over the years. Through all the excess and insanity behind the scenes, a distinctly nihilistic, rough-edged, wholly unique vision emerged. See it.