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'HEAVEN'S GATE,' A WESTERN BY CIMINO

By VINCENT CANBY
Published: November 19, 1980
''HEAVEN'S GATE,'' Michael Cimino's gigantic new western and his first film since the Oscar-winning ''The Deer Hunter,'' is apparently based on a historical incident that occured in Johnson County, Wyo. in 1890: with the tacit approval of the state government, the county's wealthy cattle barons banded together in a systematic attempt to murder more than 100 German, Bulgarian, Russian and Ukrainian settlers who were encroaching on their lands. If one can say nothing else on behalf of ''Heaven's Gate'' (and I certainly can't), it's probably the first western to celebrate the role played by central and eastern Europeans in the settlement of the American West.

''Heaven's Gate,'' which opens today at the Cinema One, fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of ''The Deer Hunter,'' and the Devil has just come around to collect.

The grandeur of vision of the Vietnam film has turned pretentious. The feeling for character has vanished and Mr. Cimino's approach to his subject is so predictable that watching the film is like a forced, four-hour walking tour of one's own living room.

Mr. Cimino has written his own screenplay, whose awfulness has been considerably inflated by the director's wholly unwarranted respect for it. Though the story really has to do with the contradictory feelings of Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson), the Federal marshal in Johnson County, toward the land war, toward a coltish, completely unbelievable frontier madam (Isabelle Huppert) and a fellow (Christopher Walken) who was once his best friend, the film's first 20 minutes are devoted entirely to Averill's graduation from Harvard 20 years before. You thought the wedding feast that opened ''The Deer Hunter'' went on too long? Wait till you see ''Heaven's Gate.'' The situation isn't helped by the fact that the university looks not like Harvard but like Oxford, where it was actually photographed.

The narrative line is virtually non-existent, which is not to say there isn't a good deal of activity - fights, shoot-outs, cross words, and lots and lots of sequences in which hundreds of extras are belligerent or dumbfoundingly merry. Though the extras speak in Russian, German, Bulgarian and Ukrainian, all of which is dutifully translated by English subtitles (along with some other dialogue we don't even hear), they act in the mindless fashion of extras in a badly directed, robust Romberg operetta.

The point of ''Heaven's Gate'' is that the rich will murder for the earth they don't inherit, but since this is not enough to carry three hours and 45 minutes of screentime, ''Heaven's Gate'' keeps wandering off to look at scenery, to imitate bad art (my favorite shot in the film is Miss Huppert reenacting ''September Morn'') or to give us footnotes (not of the first freshness) to history, as when we are shown an early baseball game. There's so much mandolin music in the movie you might suspect that there's a musical gondolier anchored just off-screen, which, as it turns out, is not far from the truth.

Nothing in the movie works properly. For all of the time and money that went into it, it's jerry-built, a ship that slides straight to the bottom at its christening.

Vilmos Zsigmond's gritty, golden photography looked better in ''McCabe and Mrs. Miller.'' The aforementioned performers, plus Sam Waterston as the principal villain - each one a talented professional, have no material to work with. In addition they're frequently upstaged by the editing, which sometimes leaves them at the end of a scene with egg on their faces, staring dumbly into a middle distance, at absolutely nothing.

''Heaven's Gate'' is something quite rare in movies these days - an unqualified disaster.

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Shit sandwich

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"Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death Wish"

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"Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" makes a living cleaning fish tanks and occasionally prostituting himself. How much he charges I'm not sure, but the price is worth it if it keeps him off the streets and out of another movie. "Deuce Bigalow" is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes.

Rob Schneider is back, playing a male prostitute (or, as the movie reminds us dozens of times, a "man whore"). He is not a gay hustler, but specializes in pleasuring women, although the movie's closest thing to a sex scene is when he wears diapers on orders from a giantess. Oh, and he goes to dinner with a woman with a laryngectomy, who sprays wine on him through her neck vent.

The plot: Deuce visits his friend T.J. Hicks (Eddie Griffin) in Amsterdam, where T.J. is a pimp specializing in man-whores. Business is bad, because a serial killer is murdering male prostitutes, and so Deuce acts as a decoy to entrap the killer. In his investigation he encounters a woman with a penis for a nose. You don't want to know what happens when she sneezes.

Does this sound like a movie you want to see? It sounds to me like a movie that Columbia Pictures and the film's producers (Glenn S. Gainor, Jack Giarraputo, Tom McNulty, Nathan Talbert Reimann, Adam Sandler and John Schneider) should be discussing in long, sad conversations with their inner child.

The movie created a spot of controversy last February. According to a story by Larry Carroll of MTV News, Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed this year's Best Picture Nominees and wrote that they were "ignored, unloved and turned down flat by most of the same studios that ... bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to 'Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,' a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic."

Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: "Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind ... Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers."

Reading this, I was about to observe that Schneider can dish it out but he can't take it. Then I found he's not so good at dishing it out, either. I went online and found that Patrick Goldstein has won a National Headliner Award, a Los Angeles Press Club Award, a RockCritics.com award, and the Publicists' Guild award for lifetime achievement.

Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Jar-Jar Binks.

But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" while passing on the opportunity to participate in "Million Dollar Baby," "Ray," "The Aviator," "Sideways" and "Finding Neverland." As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.

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