Whatever its political and historical flaws, it's too realistic dramatic to be ignored. Amazing.

Rating: 10/10 (17 February 2011)

The Deer Hunter (1978)
Extraordinary.
There is the worst of it, the Russian Roulette as a gambling game in the jungles of Vietnam and in the back rooms of Saigon. There are no restraints here. When people shoot themselves in the head, it's bloody and horrific. When they pull the trigger and survive, it has a different kind of horror, of surviving and realizing how incredible and insane this is.
There is the best of it, the love between men, and between the people in this small iron making town in Pennsylvania. There is loyalty, drinking and hunting, bonding though just being there through everything, year after year.
These two worlds collide because of the Vietnam War. But director Michael Cimino never makes it cheap. It is sensational, for sure, and people have complained every since the premier that the gambling scenes are exaggerated and rare, if even ever existing at all (there is no known proof of a single incident of Viet Cong playing Russian Roulette). There also have been complaints that the movie stereotypes the Vietnamese as sadistic, terrible people. The counter to that is that the movie isn't about all Vietnamese, but about these particular terrible ones.
A larger point to remember is that this is a dramatic fictional movie. The roulette is hugely effective and also symbolic of the chaotic world of Vietnam. We don't need to believe it really happened to believe it happened in this fictional world. The result, the point of the movie, is the emotional intensity of going to war, of coming home, of figuring out what matters in relationships and violence. And maybe of realizing how little we really control our lives.
One of the striking aspects of the film is its incredible mise-en-scene. The famous (and very long) wedding scene, the battle scenes in Nam (actually Thailand), and the more intimate bar and domestic scenes in what is supposed to be Pennsylvania are astonishing for their believable settings and details. The place this breaks down, and terribly, is when they go hunting in the Pennsylvania mountains and it looks like the rugged Pacific Cascades. Which it is--snowy peaks, huge mountains, the whole thing. It's dramatic, but it really disrupts what is otherwise a convincing world. (For people looking closely, there are glitches in the filming of these scenes, too, as the landscapes are intercut with shots of the hunters, and shots of big deer, and they don't really match geographically or even in the kind of light used.)
But if you like to like movies, and want to just get sucked in and take things for what they are, regardless of their incorrectness (political or practical), you'll find one of the most disturbing and intense movies ever made about Vietnam. It comes a year before the bigger, glossier, and even more fictional "Apocalypse Now" and the two make an amazing pair, a deeply moving statement about America and Americans.