War changes you

Rating: 7/10 (23 December 2011)

I had heard a few things about this movie, but one of the reasons that I wanted to see it was because it was on my American History film list as a film to watch regarding Vietnam. The Deer Hunter is classified as a war film, and I guess you can call it that, but I think the impact of the movie comes from the events back home rather than the war itself. In fact, the actual war only takes up about 40 minutes of this three hour movie.
The major theme of this movie, and many others dealing with the Vietnam war, is that war changes people. Cimino seems to take the World War One idea here where three friends are drafted into the war, and are going to Vietnam as a sort of rite of manhood. The movie seems to take a number of these rites of manhood into his themes. There is the deer hunt, and one becomes a man after one kills his first deer, there is marriage, and then there is war. The difference here is that the war destroys all of them. One of the three is crippled and left in a wheel chair, another takes his chances playing Russian Roulette, while the third is destroyed mentally. They all leave as friends and all return different people. When DeNiro returns, he goes straight past his welcome home party only to slink in the back door the next day. The friend whom he derided constantly beforehand becomes the personification of everything that he hated about the war, and when at first he would always be out to kill a deer, when he returns, he finds that he can never take another life, whether it be human or animal.
The crippled friend leaves a husband, and when he returns he cannot show his face around the city for he feels that he is no longer a man. He cannot walk and thus he feels less of a human being. He leaves his wife and his friends and hides in a veteran's hospital. While the other friend simply vanishes after he decides to take part in a game of Russian Roulette, even though he had watched all of his friends killed when the Vietnamese Soldiers forced them to play it. Even though he hides, he still is able to send all of his winnings back to America to help support his crippled friend.
The war itself is not glorified, and in fact there is very little fighting. Instead they find themselves trapped together in a POW camp where they entertain their captors by putting a gun to their heads and pulling the trigger. The whole feeling in this scene is one of utter hopelessness.
The Deer Hunter is a long movie that develops its characters well. It is not a war movie, but rather a movie about how war effects those who fight it, and those who support them at home. It highlights how war changes people for the worse, and how these changes are permanent and who it is not just the people abroad, but at home as well. The sombre ending shows us how just one death of one soldier effects not just the soldier who died, but everybody he knew as well.