Reviews

I haven't seen the cut down version so can't speak to it, but after watching The Deer Hunter one night and Heaven's Gate the next, I have to say that I actually prefer this film. No, it isn't everybody's kind of film, but then neither is The Deer Hunter.

TDH is like a boxing match - the hits just keep on coming. This film is a freight train - starts out soft and slow and by the end there is no stopping it so get out of its way!

The cinematography is breathtaking. The acting first rate. The craftsmanship becomes more apparent every time I watch it, and I have seen it at least 10 times. I grew up watching westerns, and I can honestly say that when it comes to "post heyday" westerns, in terms of the quality of acting, directing, and cinematography, the only other film that is even remotely in the same class is Dances With Wolves.

I saw it first as the final film in a class on Westerns at BGSU in 1999. The professor, whose knowledge of film was encyclopedic, believed it a vastly underrated classic and I have to agree.

If this is the case, why did critics and audiences alike trash it so badly? I think it was for several reasons. First, my daddy the John Wayne fan and like-minded others would have absolutely hated this film. It is the epitome of the anti-classic western. The bad guys wear the fancy hats of all colors, because the hapless good guys can't afford hats, period. Cattle thieving is often a matter of survival, and, well, the certitude of the goodness of law and order and the sanctity of private property goes straight out the window. This is a film where moral relativism is forced to take a back seat to the white hat/black hat good vs. Evil oversimplification so prevalent in "classic" westerns. In this case, viewers are placed in the uncomfortable position of having to throw their simplisticism and xenophobia out the window and take the side of lawlessness and otherness unless they want to perceive themselves as callous - even monstrous - as the cattlemen and killers for hire. Matt Dillon was the bad guy here. John Wayne in his myriad varieties becomes a cold blooded cattle pimp that could easily be described as having garlic in his soul and as charming as eels like the Grinch...Viewers don't like to feel uncomfortable, and this film is as discomforting as it gets.

Second, for many, the very length of the film predicates boredom and lack of the necessary attention span. Most people simply aren't willing to put in the effort this film requires. This isn't a film to crunch popcorn to. This is a film that requires attention. I am reminded of the scene in Amadeus where HRH tells Mozart that there are simply too many notes for the ear to hear, and if he could just cut some out, the opera would be fine. Just cut out some characters, scenes, and the heart of your film, Mr. Cimino, and your film would be fine. As a viewer, to watch the shorter mangled version would distress me. I can't imagine what it was like for an auteur like Cimino.

Third, it would be terribly easy to make fun of this film simply based on the rumors coming out of the production itself. Vast cost overruns, elaborate set design and redesign, finicky shooting schedules, and obsessive attention to detail would be, for Hollywood insiders and wannabes alike, just begging for a plethora of one liners and for one and/or the film to be the butt of jokes.

Finally, although this is pure conjecture, I can imagine that there was just a bit of professional jealousy going on. Even great directors don't often get the kind of free reign that Cimino had with this film. To quadruple a budget and not get fired? To do take after take after take until you are satisfied no matter who it inconveniences? To get to work with an incredibly talented up and coming main cast. Such as this? Unheard of. Then there's the little matter of the Oscars TDH won. What normal human being WOULDN'T be jealous, especially in a cut-throat and intensely competitive industry like Hollywood filmmaking. Add to that the apparently common dislike for Cimino as a person and it is easy to see why other industry personnel and critics could enjoy taking pot shots at this film and director.

This film, and this director, had several strikes against them already. It's no wonder they both got excoriated. Whereas TDH had the benefit of post-Vietnam War cynicism and disillusionment as context, this film walked into the "let's make America great again" mythmaking machine that was the real cowboy hero led Reagan era with all kinds of unpopular baggage attached. No, it isn't an easy film, and yes it is easy to make fun of the excesses, but taken on its own terms, this is a great film. I don't think it would be a blockbuster in any era, but that is okay. Sometimes great art is underappreciated until long after it was made. Any doubts? Van Gogh didn't sell a single painting during his lifetime, and he was certifiably mentally ill to boot. If only my ancestors had had the foresight to buy up every painting they could get their hands on, I could have bankrolled even a financial disaster such as Heaven's Gate many times over and still had change in my pocket.

As someone who has suffered from Bipolar Disorder Type I (predominantly depressive) since childhood, I understand despair. I know what it is like to spend months walking through the valley of the shadow. I have described living with a serious mental illness as walking around with a demon on my shoulder turning what should be a joyful life into a never-ending nightmare.

I, however, am one of the lucky ones. I have almost always had access to medical and mental health care, even if I wasn't FINALLY correctly diagnosed with a combination of psychiatric and endocrine disorders until I was in my late 50s. I could work, and when I finally became disabled I had private disability insurance and family to care for me until I could get SSDI. Many seriously mentally ill people do not have those things. Without them and many good, kind, and loving friends who were there during times of crisis, I well could have been a statistic.

I served as a hospital chaplain for several years, and while I had decided many years before never to take my own life, the experience of working with families in the aftermath of a suicide convinced me that there was no way that I could possibly be selfish enough to do that to my own family.

I do not make that as a religious judgment, although as an ordained minister I am obviously a person of deep faith. God truly is the only one who knows what it has been like for me to live in my head, and for the sake of the rest of you I am thankful for that.

I also cannot sit in judgment on others who suffer from chronic mental illnesses when I know what a toll simply trying to survive and maintain a relatively secure sense of yourself as a person when no matter what else you may have accomplished, your personhood is equated with your diagnosis. My alias is a nickname given by a graduate student I once taught because I carry both the titles of Reverend and Doctor, and I study how American society has defined evil at various times in history. All my degrees, awards, accomplishments mean nothing. Now my primary descriptor is "disabled due to mental illness."

The reason why I titled my review what I did is that this film so powerfully portrays the trauma that accompanies suicide that I think it could be useful as an intervention tool with people who are at risk. Very few of us are truly so alone that someone wouldn't be traumatized. Part of the film's power comes from the fact that the walk occurs 13 years after Evelyn's death, and his family and friends still struggle to speak about it. We have learned from dealing with other types of trauma that the key to long term coping with the feelings of anger, guilt, shame, etc. works best when addressed as soon after the trauma occurs as feasible. This deeply moving, intensely personal film could certainly help keep some loved ones from enduring the trauma of a suicide from happening.

I will be recommending it to every mental health advocate I know.

I have to say that I am astounded by some of the reviews posted on here. The ones who have described this film as slow probably would also have thought Psycho (except maybe for the shower scene), Magic (Anthony Hopkins as a pretty creepy guy way before Hannibal the Cannibal), and that masterpiece from Down Under, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, as tedious as well.

This film has everything going for it. Impressive acting, a fantastic score, very effective use of pacing, solid use of lighting, very strong creation of a sense of supreme isolation - physical, psychological, and spiritual - it's all there. No, it isn't a gore fest. No, it doesn't have complex cgi. But it doesn't need it. The best storytelling doesn't. Yeah, all the bells and whistles are fun, and Heaven knows I'd watch Andy Serkis perform the Yellow Pages, whether performance capture or just as a monologue. But this isn't Sleepaway Camp 666.

This is the film version of a Medieval bard, lit only by firelight on a cold winter's night, in a tavern, harp in hand, cup of ale at his elbow, with a couple dozen of the local citizenry eagerly hanging on to his every word. It is what it is, no more, and certainly no less.

I would have given the film 10/10 except for two things. 1) I also am sortakindamaybe iffy about the ending. I admit I haven't seen the original or read the book, so I don't know if the screenwriter and director were trying to be faithful to one, the other, or both. If that is not the case, then I did find it a bit unsatisfying. But, I can live with ambiguity. 2) This is the main reason I subtracted a star. The houses were too nice. I didn't realize it was supposed to be New Mexico. I thought somewhere in the Midwest, Kansas, Iowa, more Great Plains since it said prairie and because there were so few trees. I kept on asking myself, where did they get all the lumber to build a wooden house, with wooden floors, as well as enough to make nice furniture? On the prairie they would have had a sod house and sod or cow patty fires and that far out there is no way they would have had that many big windows with real glass in them. Big glass panels were very expensive and they wouldn't have survived the trip anyway, and in the winter they would have frozen their patooties off. Oh, and how was he going to bring supplies back from town when he didn't take a wagon? In the one that mysteriously showed up to take Gabriel's things away? And why didn't Gabriel take his own things with him when he left? They had to have had a wagon to get out there...

At any rate, overall I thought the film was a great effort, especially considering it is Emma Tammi's first full length non-documentary film. And Caitlin Gerard? Well, I suspect we'll be seeing a whole lot more of her as well. To quote Wandmaker Olivander, "I believe we can expect to see great things from (them). Great things, indeed."

I've seen several of Neil Oliver's other programs he's made for the BBC and quite enjoyed them. I found them enlightening, informative, and well made. This program simply wasn't up to those standards.

First, I will admit, that as a Southerner, I do get a little touchy about outsiders coming to the South and pointing fingers at us and saying what horrible people we were in the past, and then showing almost exclusively interviews with contemporary Southerners who have the "moonlight and magnolias" (aka Gone with the Wind) vision of what the Antebellum South was like. Yes, I am a Southerner, and yes, I am descended on both sides of my family from both slave owners and Confederate soldiers. I also have a Ph.D in American Studies, have studied and taught college courses on slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, contemporary hate groups, and other social justice issues and reconciliation for 15 years. I can't change what my ancestors did. I can, in my own way, however, try to make reparations.

The fact that the person who said that a lot of people owned plantations was an older white reenactor should have set some bells off in Dr. Oliver's head. In actuality, most slaves were part of small to medium sized farms, where they worked closely with their owner's family members. Large plantations were the exception, not the norm. Dr. Oliver also neglects to point out that less than two weeks after the carnage -and decisive Union victory - at Gettysburg, on July 13, 1863, Anti-Draft agitators in New York City raged through lower Manhattan killing approximately 120 and injuring 2000 African Americans. Why? They didn't buy the Union line that the war was to save the Union. Their stated objection was that they wouldn't die to free the slaves. Remember, this was only six months after the Emancipation Proclamation.

This is ultimately my issue with Dr. Oliver's treatment of race relations in America. They aren't, and NEVER HAVE BEEN, a strictly southern issue. Slavery wasn't introduced to the colonies by colonists, it was introduced by the English, and agents of the crown, and Good Queen Bess I herself profited from the slave trade, as did King James I/VI of Bible translation fame. Remember, one of the accused witches in Puritan Salem was a West Indian slave named Tituba. At the time of the Civil War, slavery and the raw materials it produced were, at some level, at the heart of every major sector of the American economy. The North relied on the raw materials produced by the slave labor and the land of the South. There were people, mostly in the South, but also in the North, who believed that Blacks were the offspring of Ham and therefore cursed by God with enslavement for Ham's sin. Just as there were Southerners who thought slavery was a sin and refused to own them. Dr. Oliver has taken what would need to be a doctoral level course to do it justice, and tried to turn it into an hour long tv show, and ends up coming off as a naive historian, which he certainly isn't, and which his other work clearly illustrates.

Furthermore, if Dr. Oliver had stuck with the idea "where did the clan in the Klan come from," I think he would have been much more successful. All it takes is a cursory glance at even the earliest writings about the "new world" to hear the native people described as certainly something other than 15th or 16th Century Europeans, even when they are being described in positive terms, much less as the savage barbarians described in the very popular captivity naratives that came later.

He's on to something when he and Hill are talking about "Clan vs. Other." Certainly the whole attitude towards Native Americans by the colonists were governed by this view of them as the other. The fact is that American history has been greatly influenced by the Scots and the Scots-Irish. And who was it who ordered the removal of the (widely) assimilated Cherokee on the infamous Trail of Tears? A child of Scots-Irish immigrants to what would become Tennessee, Andrew Jackson. Certainly there's a parallel in the Scots being sent over to Ulster and displacing the Irish peasantry from their land in an English bid for control over the unruly Irish through a land grab, and then the poor Scots-Irish Ulstermen coming here and displacing the wealthy but still "other" Cherokee from their land through a land grab...

He also ignores the fact that a significant number of lynchings occurred outside the South, the states with the most Klan members in the 20s were in the Midwest, and there were many more "sundown towns" (towns where blacks were forbidden after dark on pain of punishment or death) outside the South than in it - in the South the demographics and ubiquity of African American domestic workers made sundown towns simply unworkable.

He also ignores the fact that in areas of the country where other minorities were more predominant, such as Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Jews, etc., there were often discriminatory laws and practices directed towards them as well. Note the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese Internment Camps, hospitals where Jewish doctors weren't allowed to practice, neighborhoods with anti-Jewish covenants, laws against non-native born people owning land, the discrimination against the Irish in the Northeast, the discriminatory immigration quotas against Southern and Eastern Europeans, the poor, the uneducated, non- Christians, and indigenous peoples from anywhere.

In the end, I think he might be on to something, but he just lost his focus, which is easy to do when dealing with a subject as complex as this.