ScreeningNotes’s review published on Letterboxd:
Heaven's Gate is a daunting, sprawling epic, but if we reduce it down to its core elements we can then parse it out into a few essential component parts. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association, referred to simply as The Association, secretly publishes a death list of 125 names of local residents who are to be shot or hanged as supposed thieves and/or anarchists. Antagonist and inciting incident. Jim Averill, marshall of nearby Johnson County, hears of the death list through his old school friend, Billy Irvine, and warns the people of his county. Protagonist and forward momentum. Simple enough.
Around (or perhaps within) this narrative framework, the film builds a few key feelings and ideas. Averill is in love with Ella Watson, the madam of a local brothel, but while Watson returns his affection, she is also in love with Nate Champion, an enforcer for The Association. Watson finds herself split between representatives of the film's two central agencies (Champion & The Association; Averill & Johnson County), but it's not as simple as choosing the side without murderous intent. These men are human beings, separate the communities they represent, and while Averill shows his fondness in the form of gifts, Champion is more vocal in his sentiments, proposing to marry her when Averil withheld his dreams of matrimony. This is what we might call the emotional core of the film, the beating heart around which revolves the action of the plot and the meditation of the themes.
This conflict between The Association and Johnson County illustrates an idea at the heart of the western genre and its exploration of the founding mythology of the United States: the idea of American national identity. At this point in American history, immigrants were moving to the country in massive numbers. The result of this trend on the composition of the American people was best enunciated by the metaphor of the "melting pot," in which a wide variety of nationalities and ethnicities come together to form the singularity of "America," encapsulating the paradox of American national identity as both heterogeneous (made up of many distinct parts) and homogenous (made into one singular whole). This influx of immigrants created a backlash from the rich settlers who had been living in America for over a century (represented by The Association), who interpreted immigration as a threat to the unity and purity of their still-growing nation (a sentiment which can still be felt in right-wing American politics today).
Heaven's Gate takes its name from the Johnson County town hall, where citizens gather to do everything from dance and rollerskate to voice their grievances about land claims—voices that are often not in English, and even when they are, are often heavily accented. This is the film's microcosm of America, a country where people from different places who speak different languages come together to create a new kind of community. This new community is a threat to what came before it because of its egalitarianism: it accepts anyone, not only regardless of race or ethnicity but regardless of wealth or class as well. These immigrants are predominantly poor, coming to America to escape poverty, and the ruling class punishes them for this struggle (by calling them anarchists and calling for their deaths) and ostracizes people like Jim Averill who step outside their place in society in order to stand up for the downtrodden. Wealth fears equality because it threatens calcified power structures, it gives the poor power to overthrow the rich.
So that's what Heaven's Gate is about, more or less, but why did I like it so much? (You know, aside from the fact that I'm a huge dork who loves movies that give me a lot to chew on thematically?) One of my many favorite things about westerns is simply their aesthetic. This is the worldbuilding that I love. Some people have their colorful Marvel Cinematic Universe, some people mysteriously fall for the Unobtanium-rich forests of Pandora, but for me, the world that I want to lose myself in is the American Wild West. This is the 150th western I've seen now, and I couldn't have picked a better movie to celebrate with.
I love that establishing shot, where a cowboy rides into town and we see the town's name hastily chiseled onto a wooden placard nailed up on a crooked post, stubbornly declaring its existence against the harshness of the world. I love the famous western facades, shops and businesses declaring the unlikely success of their goods and services in big, bold lettering against the misfortunes of the frontier. I love the contrast of open, majestic, mountainous landscapes and dusty, crowded, claustrophobic taverns and saloons. And yeah, you know, I love frickin cowboy hats and macho dorks twirling revolvers around—so sue me. And Heaven's Gate nearly bankrupted United Artists to bring unprecedented verisimilitude to that world, so I don't care if it's 219 minutes long, I could spend eternity in this broken but hopeful world.
It's really hard to watch and write about this movie in anything like a calm or collected manner with what's going on in Portland right now. It might seem like an antiquated plot device to have American citizens labeled as vandals and anarchists, but Trump is literally doing that on Twitter right now, while his administration sends unmarked vans with militarized secret police to abduct American civilians and detain them in undisclosed locations. We think we've come so far from the Wild West, but the only thing that's changed is that the ruling class has become better at covering up their abuses of power.