The Deer Hunter (1978) - film review

A small working class town in Western Pennsylvania in the late 1960s.  Michael, Nick and Steven are three close friends, in their late twenties, early thirties, who work at a steel mill.  They spend their leisure time drinking heavily in bars and hunting deer in the mountains.  On the eve of their departure for service in the Vietnam War, Steven gets married to Angela, amid boisterous wedding celebrations.  When we next see the three men they are in the heat of battle, in a war-torn Vietnamese village.   Captured by the Vietcong, they are forced to play Russian roulette.  Michael turns the tables on his captors, allowing himself and his two friends to make a remarkable escape.  An American helicopter comes to their aid, but Steven falls into the river and would have drowned if Michael had not dived in after him.    Michael manages to get his injured friend to a hospital but loses sight of him.  On his return to his home town, Michael cannot face a welcoming committee.  He is preoccupied with Steven and Nick and wonders if they too have made it back in one piece.  Eventually, Michael manages to track Steven down to a veterans’ hospital and is shocked to see that his friend has lost his legs and is a broken man.  Steven tells him that he has been receiving regular parcels of money from Nick, who apparently is still in Vietnam.  Anxious to find his friend and bring him home, Michael returns to Saigon.  What he finds there will change his life forever...

The Deer Hunter is the film that probably most accurately encapsulates the mood of the American nation in the late 1970s.  This was the decade when the people of the United States lost faith in politicians, their ideals and themselves.  The Vietnam War had been a humiliating disaster.  The psychological consequences of this failure were far in excess of its physical impact.  A series of political scandals, notably the Watergate affair, didn’t help matters.  This was the decade in which America came close to losing her soul and her identity, when all the certainties of the past came crashing down and hardly anyone could face the future with any belief that things would get better.  Michael Cimino’s sprawling and ugly reflection on the effect of the war on a small American community captures this anguish and anxiety and reminds us just how deep, how poisonous were the wounds that beset the country through its tragically futile Far East adventure.

To make a film about the Vietnam War so soon after the conflict had ended was an extraordinary act of bravado, but one that paid off handsomely.  The film played its part in the healing process and was a huge box office hit, despite fears that it might have been judged to be in bad taste.  Not surprisingly, Cimino had difficulty selling the film to the major Hollywood studios and it was only in the British company EMI that he found a backer who was prepared to take a gamble.  It is worth noting that prior to this Cimino had made just one film, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), and was hardly an established name.  

Not content to make a blockbuster film about a highly controversial subject, Cimino took further risks that would now be unheard of for such a large budget production.  He assembled a cast of mainly unknown actors (Robert De Niro was the only big name performer), including John Cazale who was in the last stages of terminal bone cancer.  The first third of the film is dominated by an extravagant wedding celebration sequence, the duration of which exceeds that of the ensuing excursion into the Vietname war.  The dialogue is sparse and largely incomprehensible, the editing is messy and the pace is uneven and often painfully slow.   At times, the film feels like an art house experiment that has gone badly wrong.  And yet, for all its clunkiness and excruciating self-indulgence, The Deer Hunter is a film with an underlying sincerity and compassion to it.  There are moments when it is so poignant, so emotionally intense that you can hardly bear to watch the screen.   It is the authenticity of the performances from a high calibre ensemble cast that saves this film and gives it the quiet, understated humanity that Cimino seems to be so hell-bent on wrecking with his grand stylistic excesses.

The commercial success of The Deer Hunter was in spite of the generally negative reaction from the critics, many of whom condemned the film for its ambivalence towards the politics of the Vietnam War.  Some, notably Jane Fonda, offered outright condemnation of the film, accusing Cimino of overt racism for his slanted portrayal of the Vietcong.  Others merely lambasted the film for its excessive length and imperfect construction.  Whatever its failings, The Deer Hunter seized the zeitgeist of the moment and, in addition to filling cinemas, it was the recipient of numerous prestige accolades.  It won five of the nine Oscars for which it was nominated in 1978, including awards for Best Picture and Best Director and won the Golden Globe Best Director award in 1979.  It also launched the careers of Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken, both of whom were practically unknown before this film.  Buoyed by this success, Michael Cimino went on to attempt an even more lavish production: Heaven's Gate (1980), the infamous flop that bankrupted United Artists, ruined his reputation and pretty well put the nail in the coffin of the Hollywood auteur.  

Today, the debate over the artistic merits or otherwise of this film still rage.  The film undeniably has its flaws.  It is too long (about three hours too long if Rottweiler critic Mark Kermode is to be believed), as flabby as an overweight blue whale with a cheese pie fetish, and too often lacking anything that even vaguely resembles directorial restraint.  Yet just when the film looks as if it is about to propel you into a deep and merciful coma, it suddenly comes alive and says something meaningful, be it about love, friendship, the consequences of war or the cruel random nature of existence.  Although painful to sit through (especially if you have, like me, an incredibly low boredom threshold), The Deer Hunter leaves an indelible impression.  However, its true value is what it has to say about America in the late 1970s.  No other film quite gets across the sense of a trauma and confusion felt by most Americans at that time as this one does, and for that alone it deserves our respect, if not our indulgence.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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