A minor footnote

Rating: 3/10 (13 April 2015)

The skill of a director, like a painter and a writer, is to be able to make the right choices: to be able to prioritize elements into balance relative with each other over the course of a movie, a book or on canvas. This makes the meaning of the artistic object stronger; it helps convey its purpose, it defines the good from the great artist with all the requisite skills.
This quality is brought out in Jackson Pollock, whose works baffles and angers many as just a plane of drips of equal measure without focus or balance. This is of course utterly wrong as Pollock's work is highly structured, layered; the operating intelligence and skill forms the work.
To a degree Pollock seems like a good simile to this film. It has a vast canvas, it is along work and yet it exemplifies the narrow ability, the stunted skills. For instance, real time and cinematic time are often rendered in the same way so there are many long sequences of no real value which strain interest but as they progress, rather like cinéma vérité, they intend to add to the truth of the representation but do not because the cinema is not reality. It is this essential flaw which then weighs down the entire film to the result that all the major scenes are very long, overly so, and they are given almost equal screen time, as if to articulate that all is of the same significance.
This is defect is a cardinal error in an artistic work. Imagine a novel doing such a thing, the minutiae would be so enormous the writer would be crippled typing it all.
It is said that in post-production Cimino could not remove sequences - that he succumbed to the basic mistake of not being able to give priority to the material. However it's not that editing could revise the movie into a tighter more engaging experience with better perspective. If that were possible it would cut the duration and truncate the material which would in all likelihood yield another 'Days of Heaven', a meandering narrative disaster itself. The fault with 'The Deer Hunter' lies in the script, it has everything tossed into it: friendship, love, war, ethnic culture, the US; the list goes on and on, and with all that it its architecture is riddled with dry rot.
The result is monotonous, pompous, rambling and inevitable.
Not even the technical qualities can salvage something despite excellent photography, and the sense of place and location is very good too, as are the performances from a major cast; and yet, the most important decisions about balance and proportion were not made because those that should have known how to do it had no skill. This deficit would be demonstrated in the subsequent work.