Heaven’s Gate

This is something of an epic frontier story from turn-of the century America, with something of an all-star cast. In no particular order, we have Mickey Rooney, Isabelle Huppert, John Hurt, Christopher Walken, Joseph Cotten, Brad Dourif, and Jeff Bridges. In the lead role is Kris Kristofferson, well cast as the stand-apart Harvard law graduate, apparently one of the very few from his ranks who takes the message of the class of 1870’s valedictory address to heart, and looks for more from life than material wealth.

There is such an abundance of goodwill reeling around a putative Harvard (these scenes were filmed in Oxford) front square on said graduation day, that we are not at all surprised when the mood becomes less pleasant after we join James Averill (Kristofferson) in bustling Casper, Wyoming, where he is a county lawman. Averill, whose features, it should be said, resemble something we will expect to see on Mount Rushmore after many more years of weathering, senses that something is afoot and, it indeed turns out that Casper is bustling for a very unsavoury reason.

In these early scenes we hear much of “ugly rumours” circulating about the Stockgrowers Association (known throughout as simply “the association”) and the county’s poor immigrant farmers. If the rumours are to be believed, and it turns out that they are, then what is already a difficult life for the immigrants, subsistence farming, is going to become incalculably worse, as they stand to be hunted down and exterminated as if they were some kind of vermin. The fate of the Native Americans, and unfavourable comparisons with other parts of the world, namely Paris, France, are both referenced in the script, if the events in the screenplay aren’t in themselves a sufficient commentary on this era of American history.

At one point in the script, conditions in Casper are described as being close to “semi-anarchy”. Certainly it is the lifestyle of the immigrants, polyglot but so often united through music, that seems more anarchic, humanistic, and sympathetic, than that of the wealthy land speculators. The several crowd scenes, beginning with graduation day and ending with a chaotic battle scene, are handled with evident gusto. However, more subtle, light-hearted, vignettes are not beyond the filmmakers abilities, witness Averill’s hungover attempts to locate his boot under his bed. That being said, this is the cutting edge of the frontier, and life, after all, and most of the characters either suffer terribly or, should they make a compromise, suffer just a little less.

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