Best American Film? Certainly top 10!

Rating: 10/10 (4 January 2001)

I consider this one of the very top American movies. It is a many-faceted film the likes of which I have not seen often. It is a wonderful portrait of industrial and ethnic (Russian) small town America, for example. It is also a tragic story of working class men (and the women they left behind - Streep is wonderfully fragile) who went through the ordeal of the Vietnam war, with varying, but ultimately equally poignant outcomes (broken in body and spirit Savage; unreachable, suicidal Walken; seemingly strong yet bereft De Niro). And then it is a story of the powerful yet never articulated love of De Niro for Walken and its tragic conclusion. The term "Russian roulette" should be forever tied to this haunting picture.