The Deer Hunter (1978)

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  May 13, 2012

  Callahan441

  A sprawling epic of three hours, 'The Deer Hunter' is a striking, moving film. It focuses on a group of working class men who live in Clairton, Pennsylvania; which whilst is an industrial town, is a pretty and tranquil part of the world. However, this is strictly the film's depic... read moretion of Clairton; it was actually shot in various locations across Ohio. These men have firm working class sentiments, they work in the steel factory together and, once their shifts are over, drop by the local bar to shoot pool and have a few drinks; this is the men's comfortable existences, however their lives are soon to be turned upside down. The men are called to serve their country in Vietnam, where they are to be subjected to an array of abhorrence that will change them forever.
  
  It is a striking film in every sense. John Williams' score, the acoustic 'Cavatina', is blissful; it complements every scene it features in. Its sequences of natural beauty and Clairton life are starkly juxtaposed in the film's second act: the infamous Russian roulette scene. It is acted with truly remarkable conviction; the actors must have forced themselves into an unpleasant place to produce such harrowing realism. The scene is so visceral and intense that it creates a disturbed silence amongst an audience; even its biggest critics would have to try very hard not to be affected by it.
  
  Normally a critically acclaimed film, 'The Deer Hunter' hasn't been devoid of criticism. It has been labelled melodramatic, and it does indeed have its maudlin moments, I agree, but it has also been accused of being 'racist'. It may be a one sided account of the war and I appreciate it was released during sensitive times shortly after the war, but I do not agree. Does a film have to cover every aspect of an event? Does it have to cover every perspective? Of course not. 'The Deer Hunter' reflects one case: one group of men and their exposure to a small group of sadistic belligerents. Some say the depiction of the Vietcong is racist, but as rational, informed adults, I think we're all aware that the film isn't suggesting that all Vietcong were like this. We realise that atrocities similar to those seen in the film are committed by both parties in times of war; to proclaim that the film is trying to tell us otherwise is false and preachy. I concede that the majority of the Vietnamese are, to understate somewhat, portrayed unscrupulously, but the extent of one's criticism should be that the characterisation is flat, certainly not racist. Additionally, there are those who moan about how there were no cases of Russian roulette documented over the course of the Vietnam War; it's just an artist using his licence, you pedants. If you're so bothered by 'The Deer Hunter', if you yearn for fair portrayal, balance it out by watching Oliver Stone's vitriolic 'Born on the Fourth of July', which is a scathing attack on the United States' behaviour in Vietnam and their military and political ethos.
  
  Returning to another popular comment; I do concede its melodrama, especially during a scene where the American National Anthem is sung in unison: far too gushing and American. However, overall, any flaw is completely pushed aside by its ensemble cast, its aural and visual impact and its ability to keep your attention for 180 minutes and leave a lasting impression on you.

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  April 15, 2012

  paulkoh110

  Its running time versus its story are conflicting but in the end provides a strong portrayal of the Vietnam War.

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  November 12, 2011

  movieguru12

  Beyond amazing. Robert De Niro was amazing as usual. This movie showed you that you can go from having the time of your life to having shit. How the war can mess you up, forget who you are, and who your friends are. A young Meryl Streep in this movie. Meryl was excellent, as she ... read morealways is in film roles. I will most definitely watched this movie more in years to come.

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  October 21, 2011

  fb1664868775

  Amazing film. Top 5 all-time for sure. Amazing performances and how the vibe of the film changes is incredible. It's like 3 or 4 films in one. On first view ofcourse the POW camp scenes are the most memorable but on repeat viewings the beginning of the film (going away party, etc... read more.) is the real gem. Real human life is rarely captured on film.

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  September 22, 2011

  deano

  Three captured American GIs held prisoner in Vietnam are forced to play against one another in a bloody game of Russian roulette. Under duress, one of them puts a gun to his head, nervously pulls the trigger, and hears only the click of an empty chamber.
  This harrowing scene fro... read morem The Deer Hunter is one of the high points of a flawed but engrossing story about war and the mystique of male friendship. It won three major Oscars, including Best Picture. At the same time, it triggered strong negative feelings.
  This is not to say it is a bad movie. Director Michael Cimino has filmed a moving, if loosely edited, story tracing the evolution of the relationships of three blue-collar workers and the women families, and friends they left behind.
  This drama film's Southwest Asian scenery was beautiful. But there was a tradeoff. Cimino could not see daily rushes. The country's political affairs were volatile, and there were frequent reports of an impending military coup. So he worked in expectation that the film would be confiscated if authorities learned of its sensitive nature. Knowing this, he shot from many angles because he realised he would not have a second chance.
  For each of the three main characters, the war has changed them greatly, and none for the better. Robert De Niro is great, but the stand out here is Christopher Walken, who accurately takes his role and makes it into something memorable. And Meryl Streep brings a wonderful supporting performance as beautiful when she was young.

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  July 6, 2011

  FilmFanatik

  Well, to be perfectly honest, this isn't one of the greatest films ever made. However, I can see why some might feel that way. There are some absolutely amazing performances and some great themes running through it that get right into you. Unfortunately, all of that is hampered b... read morey the film's length. Some might argue that spending an enormous amount of time with these characters before they go to war affects how we connect with them during and after the war. To some degree, that's true, but I feel like there is entirely way too much time spent with them. Things just take far longer than they should, giving a droning effect, wherein I just wanted the film to move on. If it weren't for the riveting Russian Roulette scenes and the powerful performances by the great cast, this film probably wouldn't have had half the impact that it had OR won the amount of Oscars that it did - but that's just my opinion.

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  May 30, 2011

  moonrivers

  Drinking and gambling buddies from small town working class America go overseas and interact with Vietnamese drinking and gambling buddies and are quite a bit shocked by the difference between them. The Russian roulette scene with DeNiro and Walken dead in the middle of the film... read more is big time FIREWORKS.

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  April 7, 2011

  FrizzDrop

  *After sitting through the entire three hours in complete awe, I have found that the question of trimming the fat is rhetorical. Best Editing Oscar winner Zinner did do a great job of curtailing the amount of crazy Michael Cimino is well known for, and in that vein, we can all ag... read moreree that three hours is long, but this film is worth it.
  
  The film is split up into three main parts: The Wedding, The Boys' time in Vietnam, and Michael coming home.
  
  The wedding lasts almost an entire hour, a message of peace and happiness among the American heartland. Six childhood friends are celebrating the marriage of their friend and his girlfriend, pregnant by another man, Steven's devotion evidently apparent from his bouts with his mother. In this long sequence we are also shown the glee of Rusayn American households exemplified in song and dance. Three of these friends are slated to fight in a war that they fully believe they can win, that they will fight in with honor and bravery, ignorant to the atrocities of the bloodshed and cruel POW camps. Michael (De Niro) promises his friend Nick (Walken) that he'll never desert him and bring him back to his girlfriend, Linda.
  
  While in Vietnam Michael, Nick, and newly married Steven (Savage) are interred in a Vietnamese prison camp, filmed in Thailand. They are forced to play Russian roulette as the captors gamble on their chances. At first I found this wicked sport to be unnecessarily violent and unneeded, yet the blatant symbolism for the war was inescapable. This suicidal game of chance is a strong message for the war: the chance of death is always up in the air and men lose their sanity trying to play it. It's universal, and yet seemingly glorified by the back alley parlors pitching Nick against opponents.
  
  Back in his hometown Michael has no real feeling of hope. His past attraction to Nick's girlfriend, Linda, resurfaces, but they both know they're only clinging to the memory of him, lost somewhere in Saigon. The loss of innocence after such a gruesome and exploitative war made the ethical implications of the film apparent. Even if Cimino wasn't trying to directly criticize the war, the plot clearly states that violence plays a degrading role in society. Michael's pacifist stance on gun control and the taking of any form of life is a moral statement on all of society's conscience.
  
  This was a De Niro vehicle from the beginning of production. They needed some star power to get studio backing, they needed his skill, and he truly brought many elements of the films together. He helped the cast bond, he cast foreman Chuck Aspegren, he location scouted in Ohio, and he suggested great tips for other actors' scenes, which brought them together really well. This film really backlit the talent and variance of Robert De Niro. In the 1974 Saigon sequence, there is still hope in his eyes, trying not to desert his friend, his other promises relinquished with his betrayal. Nick, a complex and beautifully portrayed character, is both mentally anguished, and wishful. He has no hope, and this makes for a very intense scene between Nick and Michael.
  
  A beautiful scope of war, specifically Vietnam. The cast, unlike any other, each had their own place in this film. It wasn't an action film geared towards explosions and heartfelt romance. It was each person trying to make their way through the world after being touched by the senseless act of war. Streep is a weakling without the capabilities to imagine what Nick is going through, Cazale is a hazardous human being with the whimsy of a beer slugging man in the steel mills of Pennsylvania, and Savage is the newlywed who was never meant to fight a war he could never win. One of the best films on the subject of war in American history.

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  March 11, 2011

  emilebond007

  Sometimes, Cimino's direction made me wonder if he even knew what he was talking about, but overall, his touch was perfect and was filled of empathy for its characters, which made it even more heartbreaking.
  The Deer Hunter is a much more superior film to Platoon, in my opinion,... read more and is much more revolutionary. De Niro was magnificent, as always, but Christopher Walken really blew me away with a well deserved Oscar-winning performance.
  In some scenes, you could foresee Michael Cimino's future wouldn't be as great as the success he pulled with the classic that is The Deer Hunter, but by watching this, nobody can deny he pulled off such a masterpiece.

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  December 9, 2010

  mumby1988

  Which is worse? A heartless, soulless blockbuster with no wit, intelligence or shelf life, designed solely to milk money from moviegoers in the quickest and most cynical way possible? Or a film which presents itself to be a poignant, intelligent, moving work of art, only to emerg... read moree as a bloated, pretentious, self-indulgent piece of crap? For most of us, the obvious answer is the former. But that all changes once you've seen The Deer Hunter.
  
  At the risk of slowly making myself unpopular, let me be perfectly clear from the outset. The Deer Hunter is a truly hateful film, a badly-written, badly-directed, poorly-acted piece of garbage, at turns boring, racist, mawkish, churlish, pretentious and manipulative. It is in a very select group of films which are almost unendurable, because of its length, its structure, its tone and its content. It is an utterly hollow experience which leaves its audience somewhere between slipping into a coma and erupting into blind fury.
  
  There are many three-hour films which justify their length - think of The Green Mile, Barry Lyndon or The Lord of the Rings trilogy. There are also a great many films which use long unedited shots very effectively, like Alfred Hitchcock's Rope or The Passenger. The problem is not length in itself, it's whether or not the film is disciplined in a way that you don't notice or aren't bothered by the length. In The Deer Hunter, the editing is so bad that you feel every agonising minute of those three hours. Shots that should be short and sweet are allowed to run on for minutes, so that hours come to feel like days until the whole film has run itself into the ground.
  
  Film critics often heap praise on directors, but it's worth remembering that most great directors have been kept in check by their writers or producers. There's no doubt that Michael Cimino was talented; he co-wrote Silent Running and his first film, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, is a solid, light-hearted thriller. But do a little digging and you discover that all his best work happened before he was given a free rein. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was produced by Clint Eastwood, who forbade the young director from doing more than four takes on any given scene. Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley simply didn't put pressure on Cimino like they should have done; left to his own devices he couldn't separate the wheat from the chaff, and thus the whole thing is dust.
  
  Then we come to the politics of The Deer Hunter, which are at best churlish and at worst completely reprehensible. For starters, the film is every bit as racist in its depiction of the Vietnamese as The Green Berets ten years earlier (ironically, since John Wayne presented Cimino with the Best Picture Oscar). The Vietnamese are depicted as bloodthirsty gamblers who enjoy sadistically tormenting innocent soldiers and winning money in the process. There is no attempt made to explore the conflict from their point of view, or to offer examples of the intelligent political activity that brought Ho Chi Minh to power in the first place. It's the kind of blatantly racist propaganda that makes even The Birth of a Nation seem even-handed and subtle.
  
  It's easy to see in hindsight why The Deer Hunter won over American audiences. America was still licking its wounds after the fall of Saigon and so a film which portrayed their enemies as essentially mad, bloodthirsty killers with no brains or mercy was bound to strike some kind of chord. Looking at it now, the film is overtly manipulative in getting us to sympathise with the people invading and terrorising a foreign country. In the last scene before the characters play Russian roulette - which incidentally, probably didn't happen - we see Robert De Niro turning a flame-thrower on a 'gook' soldier, and the camera lingers in graphic detail as the flames slowly engulf him. And then there is the ending, where Meryl Streep begins to sing 'God Bless America' in a pathetic rip-off of Paths of Glory. The film swallows the very lies it set out to dismiss, being little more than sour grapes and flag-waving.
  
  As if that wasn't enough, the film is completely up its own fundament. It's the classic kind of epic or awards contender which constantly thinks it is saying something profoundly meaningful, when in actual fact it has no depth at all. The dialogue is just a bunch of platitudes and tittle-tattle delivered by characters that are paper-thin and uninteresting. All the issues which the film claims to address - the ethics of warfare, its impact on communities, etc. - aren't addressed beyond the odd scene of random hysterical crying.
  
  More than anything else, the film has no sense of humour. That might seem an obtuse comment to make about a war film, but the best war films are those which see the humour and humanity in the darkest situations, whether in the outlook of the characters or in the total absurdity of the war in question. Full Metal Jacket may be a harrowing, chilling exploration of the duality of man, but it's also clearly a black comedy. Apocalypse Now has the scenes of the soldiers joking on the boat, not to mention all Dennis Hopper's ramblings. The Deer Hunter takes every aspect of these characters so seriously that they become less and less human. Everything is delivered with a face so straight it's made of stone, and the more we try to connect the less it works.
  
  Then there is the tone of the film, which lurches between the ponderous and the melodramatic, the snore-inducing and the outright hysterical. For most of its running time, the film is like sleepwalking through treacle; most of the dialogue is either mind-numbingly repetitive or incomprehensibly mumbled, and the slow pace makes everything feel like a bad dream. But then, there is a massive amount of odd, stupid scenes which any editor worth their salt would have taken out in a heartbeat.
  
  It makes no sense to have Robert De Niro running through the streets taking all his clothes off, only to sit down and have a quiet chat with Christopher Walken in the very next scene. We don't need the scenes of the veterans playing bingo, or the boys winding up Chuck Aspegren with the car, or the erotic dancers in Saigon: we get the message just fine without these distractions. Most of the opening hour is pointless: when we're not being bored out of our skulls watching people dance, we have to put up with the cast being drunk and disorderly.
  
  Then there is the plot itself. As before, you don't need three hours to tell what is a relatively simple story - three men go to Vietnam, one gets left behind, one of the other two goes back to find him. But as The Deer Hunter draws to a close, various contrivances begin to emerge which cause it to tip even further into melodrama. How can Michael get back into Vietnam (and out again) just as Saigon is about to fall? How has Nick been able to earn so much money without getting shot? And why, if the army haven't found him beforehand, are they so willing to let Michael try?
  
  The performances in The Deer Hunter are not much cop either. Robert De Niro is largely phoning it in, hiding behind that thick beard, mumbling most of his lines and not showing anything approaching emotion until the final reel. Christopher Walken, like most of his roles, essentially plays himself, right down to a scene of him dancing awkwardly in the bar. Meryl Streep is showy and grating as Nick's bride-to-be, and John Savage's performance flits between dull and hysterical without good cause.
  
  The Deer Hunter is one of the worst films of the 1970s and a failure on every conceivable level. It is a total, unadulterated mess, exacerbated not just by its racism but its gleeful depiction of cruelty, whether towards humans or animals. If it had simply been boring it might be easier to forgive, or at least for the memory of its poor quality to quickly fade. But its attempts to be meaningful or profound, all of which fail miserably, leave you with a headache that will last for days and days.

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• Robert De Niro as Michael
• John Cazale as Stan
• John Savage as Steven
• Meryl Streep as Linda
• Christopher Walken as Nick
• George Dzundza as John
• Chuck Aspergren as Axel
• Shirley Stoler as Steven's Mother
• Rutanya Alda as Angela

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  Apocalypse Now (86%)
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  Once Upon a Time in America (98%)
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  Born on the Fourth of July (79%)
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  Clerks II (32%)

• • Julien: A man who says no to champagne says no to life.
• • Nick: I like the trees you know. All the different ways of the trees.
• • Nick: One shot.
• • Stan: Fuckin' A!
• • Michael: You wanna play games? All right, I'll play your fucking games.
• • Michael: This is this.

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