Explores the bounds of friendship and community as none since.

Rating: 10/10 (22 November 2006)

Mr Robert de Niro is often mooted as the greatest movie actor in America if not the world.Well,not on recent form he isn't.He may well be one of the most omnipresent movie actors in the world,but that isn't quite the same thing.There is a whole generation of moviegoers who have grown up since he last gave a performance that wasn't redolent of over-ripe ham. To them let me introduce "The Deer Hunter".Not the DVD with its superfluous "extras",not the video with its flickering images and muddy soundtrack,but the movie.In all its widescreen,stereophonic sound all - enveloping glory.Make no mistake,the cinema is the only possible place to fully appreciate Mr Michael Cimino's masterpiece.This isn't some overblown TV mini-series designed to be absorbed in 15 minute bites between adverts for dog food or MacDonalds(there's a difference?). "The Deer Hunter" is serious movie - making,requiring the viewer to exercise his or her full attention for a little over three hours. Perhaps the present generation find themselves unable to turn their mobile phones off for that long;certainly many contributors to this site seem unwilling or unable to make the effort to give TDH their full attention for all its 182 minutes.Possibly they'd be happier if Picasso had made "Guernica" a lot smaller so it didn't take so much time to look at. TDH is a movie about love and friendship.It's about an immigrant community engaged in the intricate process of retaining its ethnic identity whilst assuming that of its host nation.It's about loyalty,loss and the resilience of the human spirit.And some of it is about war.It happens to be the war in Vietnam,but it could be any war. Soldiers die,get crippled,become traumatised,be it Vietnam,Europe or Iraq. If the Russians had made TDH it would have been hailed as a great humanitarian document - another "The cranes are flying".But it was made by the Americans whose capacity for self - hatred is exceeded only by that of the British,and was duly trashed by many so-called intellectuals and opinion-makers,all wracked with fashionable guilt. The only salvageable asset in the movie was adjudged to be Mr de Niro's performance.Denigrators and admirers of the movie alike were united in their admiration for his portrayal of Michael (Cimino?),the charismatic slightly aloof natural leader of the group of young men who willingly go off to war,seeing it as their duty to their community and their community's unspoken obligation to the country that took them in. Michael is a strong-minded moral man imbued with the values of both the Old Country and the new one.A Frontiersman born a hundred years too late perhaps.In the sort of role Mr Gary Cooper might have played thirty years earlier,Mr de Niro is truly inspired.Only as the deeply unlikeable Jake La Motta was he ever near to this level of performance again.
Mr Christopher Walken has been caricaturing himself for so long that is a surprise to see him as a hungry young actor,intense and seething with inner energy,playing a man so traumatised by his experiences that his post - war life is one long drawn - out act of suicide. Miss Meryl Streep,now a grande dame of the cinema,is so beautiful and vulnerable that you want to weep.Here she has no funny accent,no mannerisms and she lights up the screen.It is the only performance of hers about which I have absolutely no reservations.When her drunken father punches her I would quite happily have taken out a gun and shot him. Mr Cimino is not a flash - bang - wallop director.He takes the time to establish his characters and their milieu,he is in this for the long haul .To me the wedding sequence is the most interesting and best realised of the movie.All the group dynamics are established here and at the deer hunt.Some of the young men go off to war,some stay at home. The community will carry on whatever happens. That is the crux of this movie.That is why it doesn't matter whether the war is in Vietnam,Europe or Iraq. Ultimately it's the survival of the community that matters,albeit at a high cost.In the controversial last scene where the survivors at first haltingly then more firmly sing "God Bless America" it's as a hymn to the community and a defiance to ill - fate .Only incidentally is it an anthem of patriotism. There is no doubt in my mind that "The Deer Hunter" is one of the great American movies.It doesn't matter that the hunt itself was filmed in the "wrong" mountains,that the VC guards would never have given Mr de Niro a loaded gun......this is not a documentary we're talking about here.Simply put,its scope is huge,its performances uniformly magnificent.Its reach,however ambitious,never exceeds its grasp.Mr Cimino set out to explore the bounds of friendship and community and succeeded as no director has done since.