Respected critic and screenwriter F.X. Feeney was the gentlest, kindest and most ardent journalist ally the late Michael Cimino ever had. Feeney was the principle voice of the revisionist reappraisal of Heaven’s Gate, for one thing — a reappraisal that led to Criterion remastering the original three hour and 39 minute cut on Bluray. Feeney so cared about Cimino’s vision that in 1987 he flew to Paris on his own dime to catch the 146-minute director’s cut of The Sicilian. (A 115-minute version played in the U.S.). Feeney and Cimino were also personal pals.
When news of Cimino’s death hit yesterday afternoon, I asked F.X. if he wanted to post some kind of tribute or appraisal. He sent the following late last night:
Michael Cimino, Chris Lambert during filming of
The Sicilian.
Michael Cimino [1939 – 2016]
Imagine my astonishment, bracketing his name with these dates. The world has lost a great artist, and I’ve lost a great friend.
First, let’s define “a great artist.” Michael Cimino made films like nobody else. He never imitated. His first loyalty was never to any movie tradition, but to the life and lives of whatever human beings were under his scrutiny. Time and again, he had the courage –indeed the steely backbone and gambler’s bravery — to take his time with any given scene or sequence, confident that audiences are interested in human beings, first and last.
What movie compares on any level with The Deer Hunter? Its first hour is taken up with a wedding and a hunt. The Vietnam War is a lightning parenthesis. That prison scene is a shock from which no audience recovers – and the film’s epic power is in its silences, particularly as embodied by the three men who return from war, each bearing within themselves an experience that they can’t communicate, not to their beloved townsfolk, not even to one another. Each is individually scarred.
The hymn “God Bless America” has never been rendered in such delicate, fragile yet indelible affirmation as it is in The Deer Hunter’s final moments.
