Too long, made too soon, about the Viet Nam war experience

Rating: Null/10 (11 February 2004)

This is a 3-hour film about a handful of Americans' experience of the Viet Nam war and it did not work for me. Well okay, the simplistic message of "War is hell" worked but that should not take 3 hours and an expensive cast like Robert de Niro and a young Meryl Streep to explain. I conclude that this film was put together when the US was still in shock after the retreat from Nam, and this is why the technically perfect cinematography is almost incoherent in showing the history that later films have visited with greater depth and honesty.
SPOILERS AHEAD! Here I tick off the things you do not get in The Deer Hunter.
Although the early seventies were a period of intense political confrontations, fed by a generation (my own) in revolt, there is no trace of political awareness in this movie. There is not a war protester, nor a TV clip of a president or a general in sight. It is strange to see "our guys" docilely prepared to do their duty by going to Viet Nam, because by now it is standard to show the "we're going to war" euphoria with bombastic speeches along the lines of "You'll make your Dad proud, son" and "It'll be over as soon as we kick butt". But there is nothing like that.
A whole half of a long film is still a long time, and I don't know why The Deer Hunter spends its whole first half showing us the wedding of these people in Philadelphia who all seem to be Russian Orthodox, without looking or sounding like any Russians that I know. This seems just to show us impressively ornate cathedral interiors and the ceremony, followed by a sloppy wedding party with too much drinking that doesn't endear any of the characters to me. Allow me to hammer once more at the political blindness here: this was the time of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the adversary allegedly facing the US in Viet Nam, but do our Americans of Russian extraction have anything to say about this? Not here, it seems.
If you expect scenes of army enlistment, boot camp training, military drilling or transport, forget it. You need to watch Full Metal Jacket instead of this film. What happens here is that the narrative cuts abruptly away from the US to a Vietnamese village where our guys are badly pinned down and under bombardment. Obviously we have arrived at the bit that is to show that War Is Hell. After the expenditure of 90 minutes of film stock, lavish Philadelphia scenes and my own viewing time, I feel cheated by the war experience simulated by just a few thatched huts as props, some explosions, the same pair of helicopters used repeatedly and one Vietcong soldier!
The film is embarrassingly unable to show Vietnamese in any realistic way. Vietnamese are either sadistic Vietcong who hold our guys as prisoners in nearly submerged cages, or throngs of refugees who block the road (and seem to have a standard-issue conical peasant headgear). In short, the Vietnamese are all either victims or "gooks", and I apologise for using that g-word which is regarded as insulting today, but does represent the prevailing attitude of many Americans at that time. The Vietnamese that appear do shout a lot, but there is never a subtitle to show what they say.
The sadistic captors that hold our guys both shout a lot and are incredibly stupid. Our guys are not too bright either, and let themselves be forced to play Russian roulette for the guards' gambling entertainment. That means them putting a loaded gun in the hands of a prisoner who has nothing to lose. Bad idea. Robert de Niro cheats and shoots the guards instead, and our guys make their escape by floating down river on a log. From my in-depth studies of wartime conditions in Viet Nam, i.e. I've watched the Rambo films, I judge the prison cages as believable, and the Vietcong's orgy of gambling without proper lookouts in the middle of a war zone as unbelievable. Unfortunately the Russian roulette theme recurs later; the whole Russian connection in this film seems unhelpful and senseless.
Our guys only have to float down river a little way and good guys arrive in helicopters to pick them up. Since our 3 guys are in indistinguishable uniforms, and later documentaries tell us about the tendency of Nam-era helicopter door-gunners to shoot anything that moved ("If a gook runs it is a Vietcong, if a gook doesn't run it is a disciplined Vietcong.") this arrival of the cavalry is unconvincing. It is also clumsy because two of the 3 guys fall back in the river, and the helicopter deserts them for no obvious reason.
One guy, Nick, is by now in a bad way with what seems to be a projecting fracture of the femur. Nick gets taken off to hospital and Robert de Niro is now on his own. We see him next in a sleazy bar in Saigon (surely the go-go dancers and local bar people are Thaïs, not Vietnamese?). On his way out he is accosted by a strange Frenchman who drags him repeating "But I insist" into a gambling den that he seems to run, where the object of the gambling is, guess what, Russian roulette. If you have followed the story this far, you will believe anything.
Two of our guys get back to Philadelphia, USA, and here is where any film like this one about the US experience in Viet Nam has a duty to confront the homecoming catharsis, not least the less than heroic reception given to the veterans. From that viewpoint The Deer Hunter fails again. Our returning soldiers are emotionally stunted by their experience, but the planned welcoming party is all smiles (and there is a line like "Didn't we really win out there?" which seems unforgivably stupid). Nick is absent until he is tracked down as a wheelchair-bound paraplegic in a vet's hospital, where he would rather stay than come home. But skimming the surface of the problem in this way, in the last reel of the film, is just not good enough.
The title itself, "The Deer Hunter" refers to a theme that seemed wasted to me. Before going to Viet Nam, our guys liked to drive into the mountains and shoot deer. After returning from Nam, Robert de Niro doesn't want to shoot a deer any more. That's all, just that. There is no other development of this trivial theme that I could see!
I speculate about why The Deer Hunter was so disappointing. One reason is the far greater honesty, particularly in depicting the Vietnamese, of later films about Viet Nam that I have mentioned here. The Deer Hunter was filmed only shortly after the US retreat from Saigon. That means the makers had limited or no access to the true location or participants. Everything would have to be set up with props, and possibly they tried to follow a vague formula for how a US military experience in a hostile land should be. For example the sadistic guards could have stepped directly out of a war movie set in a Japanese or German WWII POW camp.
The actual US retreat is shown with much use of extras to show the chaos in and around the US embassy (and the very unlikely return of de Niro to Saigon to track down the weird Frenchman, and through him the gambling den where Nick somehow has survived continuous rolls at Russian roulette while being catatoNick - the Devil made me type that awful pun), again without saying anything that should have been said, which is sadly the habit of this film. I turned to my viewing partner and commented that a couple of clips of the helicopter hovering over the Saigon embassy were real-life news clips, and she asked How do you know that? My answer is that those scenes are forever burned into the psyche of the US generation that served, or could have served, in the Viet Nam war.
Given the early date of the making of The Deer Hunter, and the "political correctness" that may have hampered its makers, I may have criticized unjustly here a film that was in its way starting to break down mental barriers of denial about the Viet Nam era. Just the showing of veteran's hospital crammed with wheelchair patients would give some people pause for thought, although I think it was unnecessary and even condescending to show their prolonged bingo game.