Lending a personal and present tense touch to last week's screening of the famous/infamous 1976 film Heaven’s Gate at the Arlington Theatre, Jeff Bridges showed up for a pithy introduction, joined by his wife Susan. A decent size crowd took cover from the rain to soak in Michael Cimino's epic neo-western — uncut and the way the auteur intended it — and also to catch a public sighting of the Montecito-based "dude," who was 30 at the time of the film’s shooting.
The Bridges kept the intro short. Susan urged folks to visit her fascinating photography exhibition in the nearby Tamsen Gallery , with artful images shot on location during the production, and noted that this is “a very timely film,” given its theme of extreme xenophobia and cruelty to immigrants. Jeff commented, “I'm not going to talk about the film. That's the way I like to see a movie — without knowing anything about it beforehand and just letting it wash over me."
There is much to wash over with Heaven’s Gate, in which appreciation of its filmic virtues — of which there are many — can be clouded over by its reputation as an indulgent disaster gone way over budget while tanking at the box office and with critics. A prevailing sentiment was that Cimino, given relative carte blanche after the success of his masterpiece Deer Hunter, let his massive ego write checks that the presumably bloated movie could never cash.