"I feel a lot of distance... I feel far away."

Rating: 8/10 (23 November 2000)

I've found myself watching a lot of Vietnam films recently, many by some of the greatest directors of all time. And Oliver Stone. Yet despite it all, I still don't think I've found one that's perfect. When Marlon Brando gasped "the horror, the horror" at the end of Apocalypse Now he could easily have been talking about tedious, navel-gazing Vietnam movies.
Maybe it's the subject matter that's so difficult to successfully realise. After all, the conflict is still just two generations away, a painful memory for many, making it a morally dubious venture to serve it up as entertainment. Perhaps as a result, many have tried to disguise the subject, to dress it up with a veneer of pretension. The films are often overlong and worthy, too, with the four I've seen (Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter) lasting over nine and a half-hours between them. It sounds ridiculous, but maybe a better way is to present the conflict not as a film, but as a movie. A 90-minute popcorn romp that finishes before it disappears up itself, yet still gets the message across. Decent Vietnam films have been made of action movies (First Blood) and sci-fi/horror (Jacob's Ladder) without the need for any great artistic merit.
Probably the most disappointing of all four is Stanley Kubrick's resoundingly average Full Metal Jacket (6), which is technically commendable but never as meaningful as it would like to think it is. Apocalypse Now (7) is a better bet, which contains more of the conflict than any of the other movies, a huge celluloid landscape of explosions and death. It lacks a certain something, though, possibly a little depth, that leaves it only on the edge of greatness. Born of the Fourth of July (6), crammed in between Cocktail and Days of Thunder marks one of Cruise's earliest attempts to break free of the bland macho roles he'd previously attempted. Cruise is fine, though the film's lack of subtlety soon becomes tiresome. The incidental theme by John Williams sounds strikingly like his sentimental swoops for Jurassic Park, but then again he'd got away with Superman/Star Wars for years and no-one had mentioned it. Williams, surprisingly, had a (guitar) hand in the gentle and quite moving theme to The Deer Hunter*.
The Deer Hunter, then, is the best of the bunch, the best Vietnam movie ever made... at least up until now. Certainly not a film you would watch for pleasure, it contains the most depth, the most psychologically reaching aspects. It's still not as emotionally reaching as I would like it to be, the film perhaps containing a clinical distance between the viewer and its content. Okay, I realise that alienation and the sense of inner isolation is what the film's about, but even before the characters go to war DeNiro's Mickey isn't quite all there. Some of the characters, such as Chuck Aspegren's loutish Axel with his obnoxious catchphrase "f***in' A!" offer little empathy for the audience. Yet it's really only Walken, DeNiro and Streep who get genuine characters anyway, the rest are just support.
I remember being unimpressed with the film the first time round, and I admit that, in the main, I was wrong. Direction is almost flawless by Cimino, though oddly he's never had great success since, his post-Deer CV including the flop Heaven's Gate. Acting, too, is top-rate, and the realisation of Pennsylvanian village life, juxtaposed with life in the Saigon village, is exceptional. The picture scores because the nature of war as evidenced by most directors (loads of helicopters, macho bluster, explosions, and graphic deaths) are largely absent, the film being an intense, character-based piece. The famous highlighted section of the war is Walken, DeNiro and John Savage as POWs, forced to undertake harrowing turns in a game of Russian Roulette. 8/10.
* Edited four years later to add: No, it isn't the same John Williams. There's research for you.