Brilliant cast and director; overpraised twisted propaganda

Rating: 4/10 (27 June 2007)

Coming soon after the United States had suffered a humiliating defeat trying to prop up a corrupt minority government in Vietnam and the unemployment rate in the "rust belt" was making national news, rising but fiscally uncontrolled director Michael Cimino assembled some of the greatest of the new generation of university trained actors for what amounts to a phony artistic commercial pandering to the great middle American "silent majority" who didn't know (and didn't care) how the world could have turned against them.
Because the story seemed "edgy" with extreme, seemingly unmotivated violence (the Vietnam torture and "Russian Roulette" scenes are all many of its fans remember from the film) and justly flaunted the layered performances which Cimino drew from his superb cast and cinematographer, many if not most critics (and the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences) hailed it as a major work of art. It holds its reputation today because the world (for many of the same reasons - not to mention the self centered world view of a couple "cowboy" presidents) has remained a violent place and frequently unfriendly to well meaning Americans. What THE DEER HUNTER actually is is a piece of S&M pornography stroking "Middle America" with the illusion that nothing is their fault and the rest of the world is even more mindlessly violent than the unemployed steelworker who defines his existence by how freely he can kill animals with his (unregulated) gun. That they can identify with; it takes no deep thought or understanding.
The tragedy (and irony) in the over-praise heaped on the excessively unpleasant (but well made) DEER HUNTER is that some years later, when Cimino directed an actual masterpiece tying together the mythology and history of the American East and West - with an only slightly less accomplished cast - HEAVEN'S GATE was eviscerated for all the same excesses the director produced to far less effect in THE DEER HUNTER, the film proved a financial disaster and destroyed the producing studio.
While the later film was epic in proportion and had sex and violence aplenty, IT lacked the S&M, torture and kinky sexual overtones - and sadly, the audience that flocked to THE DEER HUNTER. One must suspect the two were not unrelated, and THAT'S a real shame.