Times Have Changed, Thus Has This Film's Effect, But It Is By No Means Bad

Rating: 8/10 (22 September 2008)

Michael Cimino's curiously hailed classic The Deer Hunter is a three-hour drama in three hour-long acts, a chronicle dropping us into what seems to be the middle of the lives of a group of friends. It is a trace of how the Vietnam War crossed the threshold into numerous lives and distorted them dreadfully without end. What I find wise about this story is its lack of any sort of slant for or against the war. However, times must have changed, because once it was one of the most emotionally devastating movies ever made, and now it is not. That does not mean, moreover, that it is at all a bad film, because it is quite good.
I am most certainly disappointed that Michael Cimino became more or less estranged from Hollywood after the disastrous failure of Heaven's Gate, because judging by his work here, he could have contributed so much more to cinema over time. Think about it! Like more European and Asian films have done and American films since The Deer Hunter have scarcely had the confidence to do, Cimino takes his time with the opening scenes at the steel mill and the saloon and especially with the wedding. It's key not just that we come to know the characters, but that we feel immersed into their lives, that the wedding rituals and day-to- day life are more than mere Russian-American fine points. I am sure in 1978 that this technique more than worked.
The first act is primarily a wedding celebration as in The Godfather, but made merry by working commonfolk who have come to eat, dance get smashed and bid farewell to the three young men who have joined in the Army. The event lasts for nearly an hour for everyone to become inebriated, and then the newlyweds drive off and the rest of the friends go up into the mountains to hunt, to shoot, to murder, some deer. They are yet at a stage where they believe shooting a gun at an objectified target to be gratifying.
Then Vietnam inhabits the screen, all of a sudden, with an abrupt barrage of blasting, blaring racket of helicopter blades, machine guns, and indistinguishable yells and screams, and the second act chronicles the three men's experiences. At the film's heart comes the iconic, and very tense and suspenseful in spite of its familiarity, as they are held captive and forced to play Russian roulette while their Vietnamese subjugators gamble on who will blow his own brains all over the place.
Russian roulette develops into the all-consuming representation of the movie: Whatever you can accept as true about the game, regarding its consciously indiscriminate brutality, regarding how it affects the reason and judgment of anyone coerced to take part in it, will be relevant to the war all together. It is shrewd symbolism because, in the story's framework, it renders any philosophical assertion concerning the war redundant.
De Niro's character is the one who by some means recovers the power to persevere and to keep Savage and Walken functioning. A great touch of realism is when De Niro comes home and is welcomed uncomfortably by the townspeople. The story moves along, into its third act, into unprecedented territory, but amidst all of that, we find a difference, a big one, in De Niro's attitude when he's out hunting deer.
This movie is assumed to be on the subject of countless themes and issues, male bonding, foolishly mechanical patriotism, the demoralizing results of war, the awakening of conscience to violence and killing. It concerns any of those focuses that you want to regard. What is so funny about this film, objectively, as the movie itself is not at all literally funny, is that it has no stance one way or the other on the validity of the war in Vietnam, because it was made afterwards. Everyone realizes the gratuitous wars were wrong afterwards. I would bet that it would have had some sort of slant if it had been made before the war ended. But what it maintains is that we not overlook the casualties of a war.