How Long Is “Heaven's Gate”?

Michael Cimino, riding high on the success of his 1978 The Deer Hunter reaches too far with too little in Heaven's Gate -- a mega-buck mega-fiasco by most standards. The minimal storyline is structured around some bloody feuds in Wyoming in the 1890s. Conservative cattle ranchers led by Canton (Sam Waterston) draw up a hit list of over a hundred Eastern European immigrants they consider to be rustlers. Then the story wanders off into subplots about the Federal Marshal and his lover (Kris Kristofferson and Isabelle Huppert) and the Marshal's friendship with Champion (Christopher Walken) -- a romantic rival. For most audiences, the film's final confrontation between the cattle barons and immigrants is inadequate compensation for three and a half hours of underdeveloped characters and plot holes.