A film masterpiece!

Rating: 10/10 (2 July 2007)

I watched this magnificent film when it was first released and returned to it yesterday so many years later and I was stunned at its magnificence. I know nothing of film commentary so these viewpoints are only the ramblings of a person that saw a movie 30 years after he first watched it and was amazed that so much of film making has gone backwards.
The controversy about Cimino and his box office failure, Heaven's Gate, must be the worst catastrophe that has ever struck American film. That miss meant that the world lost a director that saw film as an empty canvas upon which movies could be worked much as 20th century painters reworked painting in new styles. In Deer Hunter we can see Cimino rework film content much as he did in Heaven's Gate, to much less acceptance. Cimino did not create one movie but a series of movies roughly revolving around a centrepiece. He was not making a "war movie"; rather, he was creating a pastiche of little movies with the same characters, much as he did in his hugely misunderstood Heaven's Gate.
For many reasons Heaven's Gate misfired and today we must sit through movies that begin and end virtually in the same time-frame and with a vertically constructed story line. We do not have the great directors of the 70s and 80s to stretch the composition of film as Cimino and some of his compatriots did.
Deer Hunter was Cimino's exploration of many of those themes that he was to develop in Heaven's Gate: the use of eastern Europeans as the matrix for the film, long scenes that many viewers saw as unnecessary, scenes crowded with people, long or medium shots rather than the current mania for massive closeups and movies within movies to mention only a few.
People have commentated here that the Russian Roulett scene was a metaphor for America's catastrophe in Vietnam; however, I see it as a metaphor for growing up. The potential for disaster growing up in a little steel town is manifest; the only thing that saves your mind is being too young to recognise the dangers confronting you. It is as lucky to emerge from these little towns as it is to live through Russian Roulette and the odds might be worse.
Deer Hunter is a massively thought provoking movie that can be enjoyed and milked for its insights many, many times.