Magnum Hopeless

Rating: Null/10 (18 June 2013)

"The story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is a lie. The truth lies outside, in what we do." - Zizek
A near scene-for-scene remake of 1939's "The Four Feathers", Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" tells the story of several friends (Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken) from small town Pennsylvania. Early sequences watch as the gang work in a steel mill, congregate and go on hunting expeditions. Cimino's photography, aided by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, is exceptional throughout, but his film quickly nosedives into pretentious, unintentionally funny territory. Cimino indulges in a prolonged wedding sequence (cribbed from Coppola who cribbed from Visconti), filters "Best Years of Our Lives" through a Vietnam era prism, has DeNiro run about naked like a Method Actor fishing for Oscars, and treats us to a forced sequence in which our heroes play Chopin on a piano whilst looking REALLY REALLY SERIOUS. This is a deep movie, see.
The hell of Industrial America then becomes the hell of the Vietnam War. Here our heroes, now American soldiers, watch North Vietnamese "savages" kill civilians. They're then captured by the Vietnamese and made to play Russian Roulette. They survive this ordeal, but Walken's character is pushed into madness and begins to play Russian Roulette for money in a Saigon gambling hall. Symbolically unable to escape the damage done by Vietnam, he spends six years there, gambling with bullets. You'd think the law of averages would catch up with him, but no.
"Don't leave me over there," Walken tells his buddy DeNiro, which leads to DeNiro having the longest delayed reaction in the history of cinema. Eight years later he goes back to Saigon in the hopes of finding Walken, a missing person's search which is apparently really easy. They find each other, Walken commits suicide (partially to punish - and prove his love to - "best man" DeNiro), the film ends with a funeral and a silly, unearned scene in which our gang sing "God Bless America". You can feel Cimino straining with every scene to make a GREAT EPIC. The film won five Oscars.
Like most Vietnam war movies, "Hunter" hinges on romanticised madness. Deer hunting becomes a metaphor for "virtuous, humane kills" and Russian Roulette becomes a metaphor for the madness inducing chaos of Vietnam. As is typical of racist war films, the Vietnamese are portrayed as grinning (their dialogue is not even Vietnamese), Oriental savages (introduced with propagandistic scenes showing the NVA killing babies and women) and the "reason" for US defeat is sidestepped by making the Vietnam war itself incomprehensible. Where else but in a wholly irrational country could the US lose a war?
Whilst several sequences play with irony (Russian-Americans playing Russian roulette etc), Cimino's tale is one of solemn tragedy. An account of what evil, sadistic, barbaric Vietnamese did to poor, innocent Americans, the film, like "Apocalypse Now", oozes macho self pity with a dash of counter-culture disillusionment and strained appeals to high culture (Conrad, Eliot, Chopin songs, Orthodox hymns etc). The film is silly elsewhere, with random helicopter rescues, love triangles, many cheesy "dramatic" scenes and exploitative Roulette sequences (why's everyone in Saigaon playing Roulette?) which Cimino shoe-horned from another Las Vegas themed script he was working on. Some critics, like Jonathan Rosenbaum, spotted the film's hokiness right away. Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Arnett would call it a "simplistic lie".
As with most war movies, the overriding message is "look what they did to us". Cimino perpetuates the racist stereotype that sustained much of America's involvement in Indochina, and hides behind designer madness and much irrationality. Compare to Pontecorvo's "Burn!", which offered a clear analysis of imperialist expansion, and "In the Year of the Pig" and "Hearts and Minds", two documentaries which the CIA waged war upon and whose theatres met with bomb threats.
In 2012, the Pentagon began The Vietnam War Commemoration Project, a 13 year, 65 million dollar propaganda effort to clean up the image of the Vietnam war. What are they covering up? The fact that the North Vietnamese constituted a political movement with near total local, popular support, that the US artificially divided Vietnam in disregard of Geneva negotiations (becase Eisenhower knew over 80 percent of the population would vote for Ho Chi Minh), that the US put in place and backed psycho puppet leaders, that even the South didn't support the US, that the US did everything it could to prevent unification and scuttle elections, that 4 million Vietnamese died, that more bombs were dropped than in all previous wars combined, that tens of thousands were assassinated by the CIA's Phoenix Program, that nukes were threatened 13 times, that US land-mines still kill Vietnamese to this day (52000 and counting), that millions of gallons of poison, herbicide and chemicals were used, that US campaigns in Cambodia were directly responsible for the rise of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot (later supported with 89 million dollars) and the genocide which took place afterwards, that the first Tonkin Gulf incident was started by US aggression, that the second never happened, that over five million villagers were forcibly displaced, that political prisoners were jailed/tortured in "tiger cages" and that 90 percent of Northern levees, hospitals, villages, towns and industries were intentionally bombed. The US has similarly destabilised over 80 countries in the past 100 years. And yet here's a film with the NVA torturing small-town Americans.
During and after the Iraq war, US soldiers committed suicide at a rate of 1 every 25 hours. This figure doesn't include attempted suicides (roughly 1900 in 2009 alone). In Vietnam, the number of US suicides totalled about 150,000. In real life, these vets were trapped in a double bind, unable to reconcile their belief that their conflict was righteous with their actual deeds; they thus nihilistically self-destructed. Cimino wants you to believe the opposite; that the NVA pushed men to suicide.
3/10 – Depressing.