Astonishingly Overrated

Rating: Null/10 (22 November 2003)

MINOR SPOILERS
This film is a mess, set in some sort of fantasy universe where Russian Roulette is a game of sport in Vietnam and the North Cascade mountains are somewhere in Pennsylvania. First of all, although I'll criticize this film as being slow, I'm typically very tolerant of 3+ hour films, even ones that are widely regarded as slow.
Although the acting is fantastic, the characters are so inarticulate that I found myself very frustrated watching them interact. "Get on with it" I'd say, but they wouldn't. "SAY A COMPLETE SENTENCE" I'd plead, but no, never. They are stuck in a land of sentence fragments in which no coherent thoughts may be communicated verbally. It seems like a device used to hide the general incoherence of the film itself.
The interminable wedding scene will convince you that you're watching someone's overlong, unedited wedding video. You'll get the message immediately: steel town, blue-collar, hard-drinking, Russian immigrant population. But it'll go on and on. I disagree with those who defend this sequence's length as "character development" because I don't find the characters particularly well-developed beyond iconic blue-collar types, with the exception of Michael who is shown as more tough-minded and resourceful than his buddies.
The Vietnam sequence is pretty tense if nonsensical, and was for me the only part of the film where I cared what happened. That said, it still suffers from editing and storytelling problems, jumping around somewhat unexpectedly. The post-war part of the film is where the film really fails, because I really didn't care much about the individual fates of these three guys. Nick's fate was simply... odd.
This film becomes a bit more palatable when considered as allegory rather then a literal depiction of events, although that doesn't save the muddled and empty dialog. I can only imagine that the film received its Academy awards based on the popularity of its message and its temporal proximity to the war itself.