The Fascinating and Melancholy Michael Cimino

When Michael Cimino died in 2016, I expressed an ardent wish to read a well-researched and sympathetic biography of him. Here it is: Charles Elton’s “Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision” is as engaging, as fascinating, as revelatory, and as melancholy as one might expect. The book, which was published in March by Abrams, has two main themes: first, how the director’s career was slaughtered by critics’ mockery of his masterwork, “Heaven’s Gate,” when it premièred, in 1980; second, that Cimino presented as a woman, at least in private, for part of the last twenty-five years of his life. Elton doesn’t find or force any significant connections between these two aspects of Cimino’s life, but their link is under the surface, by way of the third main subject of the book: a grand, mysterious love story between Cimino and his principal collaborator, Joann Carelli—a relationship that remained strong from his earliest days as a director to the end of his life.