It affects people on the deepest of levels...but is it really interested in searching the souls of these men or in being a treatise in brutality?

Rating: 6/10 (12 March 2010)

Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" is aching for a battle: even in the interminable wedding sequence, wine spills like blood. Though it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the film is so puffed-up with a grisly sort of foul-mouthed machismo, one doesn't react to it as much as repel from it (much like John Boorman's "Deliverance"). The movie isn't edited with precision, and yet it still stuns with its gripping depictions of savagery and man's inhumanity toward man. Unfortunately, the underlying point of the film seems to get lost in its general assemblage; both the editing and Cimino's direction are not as sharp one might hope (particularly in the final 45 minutes). Three men from a blue-collar town in Pennsylvania serve harrowing time in Vietnam, while life on the homefront seems repressed under a constant cloud of uncertainty and hopelessness. Cimino grinds the audience down, not with the intermittent scenes of violence but with the anticipation of those moments. It's a bludgeoning slab of filmmaking. There isn't much mystery in Cimino's approach; however, when a sensitive moment is called for, the director certainly delivers. Performances and technical aspects are at the highest level (which causes viewers to react, like it or not), but this isn't art any more than it is an anti-war film. **1/2 from ****