Michael Cimino's three-and-a-half-hour western, now fully restored, puts the grandeur in folie de grandeur
This restored rerelease of Michael Cimino's spectacular western epic puts the grandeur into folie de grandeur. Brought back to its full three-and-a-half-hour-plus running time, it is colossally ambitious and mysteriously moving, with an unhurried, unforced pace, beautifully photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond. The subject is the Johnson county war in 1890s Wyoming: small homesteaders found themselves harassed into abandoning their plots of land to the big ranchers. Cimino's movie sees this as nothing other than an American agribusiness pogrom: these small farmers are migrant incomers from eastern and central Europe attacked by cattle barons and their Wasp Washington associates who have drawn up a "death list" of victims. Kris Kristofferson plays Jim Averell, a well-born lawyer, idealist and Harvard man who takes the farmsteaders' side; Christopher Walken is Nathan Champion, the ranchers' cynical hired gun.
This restored rerelease of Michael Cimino's spectacular western epic puts the grandeur into folie de grandeur. Brought back to its full three-and-a-half-hour-plus running time, it is colossally ambitious and mysteriously moving, with an unhurried, unforced pace, beautifully photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond. The subject is the Johnson county war in 1890s Wyoming: small homesteaders found themselves harassed into abandoning their plots of land to the big ranchers. Cimino's movie sees this as nothing other than an American agribusiness pogrom: these small farmers are migrant incomers from eastern and central Europe attacked by cattle barons and their Wasp Washington associates who have drawn up a "death list" of victims. Kris Kristofferson plays Jim Averell, a well-born lawyer, idealist and Harvard man who takes the farmsteaders' side; Christopher Walken is Nathan Champion, the ranchers' cynical hired gun.
- 8/1/2013
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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