The Deer Hunter - Friends Under Fire

Dec

3

The Deer Hunter - Friends Under Fire

≡ Category: Action, Art, Drama, Highly Recommended, Movie Reviews, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Drama/ Action/ Art
Director: Michael Cimino
Year: 1978

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE

It’s kind of surprising that The Deer Hunter won an Academy Award for Best Picture back in 1978. It’s a long picture, over three hours. The first hour of the movie is almost like a documentary about a community of Russian immigrants in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. The Deer Hunter shows these folks working in a steel mill, sending off three of their native sons to Vietnam, going hunting, and most of all, participating in an elaborate wedding, followed by a drunken reception. Imagine the wedding sequence that opens the Godfather, only twice as long and without any inherent drama. It’s dramatically shapeless, as if director Michael Cimino was reluctant to enforce any sort of artificial dramatic structure on top of it.

The point, dramatically speaking, is for us to get to know the heroes of the story, so that when they get in trouble, we actually care, but Cimino dwells on the quotidian details far past any dramatic necessity. I enjoyed it, but for modern audiences, it will feel very slow.

It’s a shock when you get to the Vietnam sequences, which are lightning fast and compact, in contrast to the languid and extended nature of the stateside sequences. There is really no preparation. The viewer is dropped directly into a combat sequence. There is also very little in the way of connective or expository material. In one scene, our heroes have met after a battle. In the next, they’re prisoners of war.

Then comes the most intense, concentrated filmmaking of all, the first of two Russian Roulette sequences. The Vietnamese force their captives to play Russian Roulette with each other, betting on the stakes. It’s clear that much of the dialog is improvised. Robert Deniro, John Savage and Christopher Walken are fantastic in this sequence, particularly Deniro. The way Deniro synthesizes despair, rage, singleminded determination, and compassion is just amazing. Deniro was nominated for an Oscar, and he deserved it.

In fact, The Deer Hunter was blessed with wonderful actors in the lead roles. Besides Deniro, John Savage, Christopher Walken, John Cazale, and Meryl Streep are all wonderful. Christopher Walken has an amazing scene in which he has lost his mind and Deniro is trying to get him to remember who he is. I’m sure that’s the scene that won Walken the Best Supporting Actor Oscar that year. Meryl Streep probably has the hardest job of all. Her role is not showy at all, and requires that she create interest in a completely ordinary human being. Streep gives her character infinite shading in one of her customary rich performances, but at the time, Streep was the new kid on the block, so her performance was something of a revelation.

As good as the lead actors are in The Deer Hunter, the Asian actors in the gambling and war sequences are even better. These guys register as being absolutely real, in a heightened way. The lead actors, as good as they are, seem to be acting. The Asians in the cast are totally immersed in their roles, to the extent that they are indistinguishable from their characters. Especially noteworthy are Po Pao Pee, as a Chinese referee in a gambling den, and Vitoon Winwitoon, as a Vietcong officer.

But what are we to make of the film as a whole? Despite the ethnographic detail in the beginning of the film and in the Vietnam sequences, The Deer Hunter is hardly realistic. The central device of Russian Roulette is mostly symbolic. A clue to the intentions of the filmmakers is supplied by the cinematography of the great Vilmos Zsigmond, and the direction of Michael Cimino. The filmmaking is poetic. The sequences are shot like paintings, like a waking dream.

The Deer Hunter is not really about Vietnam, even though the specifics of the action relate to that war. Actually, it is only secondarily about war itself, which is capably depicted as a hell of carnage and utter corruption. No, at it’s core, The Deer Hunter is about a group of friends, and how they react to extreme diversity. Michael Cimino uses this simple subject matter as an excuse to indulge in a love for ethnography. This love would soon be his undoing, when he directed Heaven’s Gate, with which he almost singlehandedly bankrupted United Artists, by indulging in expensive recreations of Western frontier life which were only tangentially related to the story he was supposedly trying to tell.

Is Cinimo’s depiction of the industrial town in The Deer Hunter self-indulgent? Yes. Is it beautiful? Yes, but if there wasn’t a powerful dramatic core to The Deer Hunter, the film as a whole would be a snooze. What saves the movie is the powerhouse acting of the leads, and the intense Vietnam sequences.

Is The Deer Hunter worth watching for modern audiences? I’d have to answer that question with a qualified yes. If you have a taste for ethnography (that is, you’re interested in cultures unlike your own), you’re willing to sit through an hour of film in which almost nothing happens, but you get to observe small town culture in great detail, and you aren’t a stickler for dramatic logic, you’ll probably enjoy The Deer Hunter.

When you get right down to it, The Deer Hunter is a high budget art flick with an epic length, a few exciting and intense action sequences and some high-powered acting. If that sounds good to you, go for it.