THE DEER HUNTER Movie Review
1978 Michael Cimino
The years have heightened the flaws in Hollywood's first major attempt to address the Vietnam War. It remains at times a moving film despite director Michael Cimino's excesses and lapses. The main characters are strong, with the four young leads doing very good work. Seen as any kind of serious comment on the war or the country of Vietnam, it is ludicrous at best, racist at worst.
The story opens in a Pennsylvania steel mill on the morning that Steven (John Savage) is going to get married. Just a few days later, he and his best friends Michael (Robert De Niro) and Nick (Christopher Walken) will join the Army and go to Vietnam. Nick is dating Linda (Meryl Streep), though they are not too serious, and she and Michael are also attracted to each other. The shattering experiences the guys are subjected to in Vietnam change everything. Those are the bare bones of the plot, and with a few alterations that synopsis could fit many American war films. Cimino buries that simple story beneath tons of extraneous details, often losing sight of it completely in sprawling scenes that add nothing.
In the first hour, for example, a long scene in a bar shows us how close the three male characters and their other friends are. After a quick scene describing Linda's abusive, drunken father, the Russian Orthodox wedding is played out, with full attention given to the trappings, the singing, the ritual. Then it's on to the combination wedding-farewell party, with more singing and dancing and drinking and bonding. Finally, the ritual deer hunt in the mountains is conducted, and that involves still more bonding, and what sounds like the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir in celestial accompaniment during the holy moment when the buck is stalked.
Only then, more than an hour after the opening credits, does the scene shift to Vietnam. From that moment on, Cimino takes his cues from John Wayne's The Green Berets. His North Vietnamese are sadistic beasts who toss grenades into shelters filled with helpless women and children, and force American captives to play Russian roulette for their amusement. Admittedly, those scenes are staged with power, but later the appearance of Julien (Pierre Segui), a jaded cosmopolitan Frenchman, at a Russian roulette gambling den, implies that the suicidal game is meant to be a metaphor for America's seduction into Euro-Asian corruption. Whatever his intention, Cimino goes bravely forth, staging his big finish during the fall of Saigon, again using chaotic action and cacophonous sound to distract viewers from the massive narrative lapses.
That said, record-breaking audiences in 1978 ignored those flaws, and so did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when it gave the director and the film the top Oscars. What they understood then was that the film connected directly with the nation's ambivalent, contradictory feelings about the war and the men who fought it. In the quieter moments—from the opening notes of Stanley Myers's elegiac score, so beautifully played by guitarist John Williams, to the closing chorus of “God Bless America”—the film touches the right emotional chords. One can argue, as writer William Goldman does persuasively, that The Deer Hunter is a “comic book movie,” but no one can deny that the film delivered a message that people were ready to accept.
Cast: Robert De Niro (Michael), Christopher Walken (Nick), Meryl Streep (Linda), John Savage (Steven), George Dzundza (John), John Cazale (Stan), Chuck Aspegren (Axel), Rutanya Alda (Angela), Shirley Stoler (Steven's mother), Amy Wright (Bridesmaid), Mady Kaplan (Axel's girl), Mary Ann Haenel (Stan's girl), Richard Kuss (Linda's father), Pierre Segui (Julien), Joe Grifasi (Bandleader), Christopher Colombi Jr. (Wedding man), Joe Strnad (Bingo caller), Paul D'Amato (The Sergeant); Written by: Michael Cimino, Deric Washburn, Louis Garfinkle; Cinematography by: Vilmos Zsigmond; Music by: John Williams, Stanley Myers. Producer: Universal, Barry Spikings, Michael Cimino, John Peverall. Awards: Academy Awards ‘78: Best Director (Cimino), Best Film Editing, Best Picture, Best Sound, Best Supporting Actor (Walken); Directors Guild of America Awards ‘78: Best Director (Cimino); Golden Globe Awards ‘79: Best Director (Cimino); Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards ‘78: Best Director (Cimino), National Film Registry ‘96; New York Film Critics Awards ‘78: Best Film, Best Supporting Actor (Walken); National Society of Film Critics Awards ‘78: Best Supporting Actress (Streep); American Film Institute (AFI) ‘98: Top 100; Nominations: Academy Awards ‘78: Best Actor (De Niro), Best Cinematography, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Streep). MPAA Rating: R. Running Time: 183 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV, Letterbox, DVD.