Well, I may lose some points here, but I did not enjoy The Deer Hunter. Often considered one of the greatest films of all time, The Deer Hunter is the 1978 classic film directed by Michael Cimino. It is a film about friendship, male bonding, and life in general that uses the Vietnam War as its backdrop. The film follows a group of Rusyn (Slovakia, Ukraine, etc.) American steel workers from a working-class Pennsylvania town as they experience joy and pain throughout the course of two decades. It is certainly an epic film and, with a runtime of 182 minutes, unfolds with a heavy dosage of care and attention to detail.
Michael Cimino has essentially split The Deer Hunter into three acts. The first act depicts the life of Steven (John Savage), Nick (Christopher Walken), Stanley (John Cazale), and Mike (Robert De Niro) as they work, love, and laugh in Western Pennsylvania. Steven is getting married to Angela (Rutanya Alda) and we are taken through an extensive wedding sequence that includes a lot of singing and drunken ramblings. The following day, the men go on a deer hunt in the woods, drinking some more and having a good time. These scenes build the characters, somewhat, as we prepare for the events of the second act.
The second act drops us suddenly and swiftly, after about one hour and ten minutes of background, into Vietnam. We are in the middle of a conflict, immediately, and Mike becomes reunited with Steven and Nick after some combat. The three men eventually are captured, although this is not shown, and find themselves taken by the local, evil Viet Cong. The Viet Cong force them to play Russian roulette for the entertainment of the jailors, so eventually Mike and Nick hatch a plan to get out of there. After a long, tense exchange, the escape occurs and the men are on the run with an heavily injured Steven in tow. Mike gets out with Steven. Nick, meanwhile, has become psychologically damaged as the result of his torture and remains in Vietnam.
The third act pulls the characters back to a normative state of affairs. Mike returns home, but refuses to attend his own welcome party. Instead, he waits it out and then confronts Nick’s fiance (Meryl Streep) and the two eventually become romantically involved. Mike visits Steven in a military hospital eventually and discovers that Nick is still back in Vietnam. Nick is working in some sort of Russian roulette circuit, kind of like professional wrestling, and Mike attempts to bring him back to America. The remainder of the film is a sombre jettison to a moody rendition of “God Bless America” as sung by the remaining characters in the film. Okay.
The Deer Hunter won a slew of Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor for Christopher Walken, and Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. The film would, foolishly, catapult Michael Cimino into the stratosphere as he was viewed as a bankable talent in terms of a director. As most people know, his follow-up film, Heaven’s Gate, is widely regarded as one of the most overblown flops of all time. As I was watching The Deer Hunter, I did not see a quality, bankable director out of Cimino. Instead, I saw a self-obsessed, bland director that captures scenes with a sort of plodding energy rather than injecting passion into the film and giving his performers some assistance. I truly believe that had it not been for Walken, De Niro, Streep, and the rest of this great cast, I wouldn’t even be talking about The Deer Hunter.
And it is the performances that make this film halfway interesting and compelling. De Niro, entrenched firmly in his “can do not wrong” phase, is excellent as Mike, but it’s Walken who steals the show with his edge-of-insanity portrayal of Nick, lighting off something that was kind of always there within his character as he copes with the loss of his own mind. Streep, who isn’t really given much to do other than to get slapped around from relationship to relationship, is also good, as is Savage and Cazale. Everybody acts accordingly in this moody epic, helping Cimino draw out scenes with emotional impact and long-lasting accord. Still, it all comes back to the over-direction of the piece again for me and I can’t shake the notion that The Deer Hunter, at its core, isn’t that good.
The Russian roulette sequence is often called upon as being one of the most intense and heart-pounding sequences in film history. This would have been the case had the build not been eroded by subsequent usage of Russian roulette as Cimino’s relentless metaphor for the horrors of the combat and for the shocking nature of violence. Instead, the Russian roulette pieces are overused here, as Nick enters some sort of underground Russian roulette competition league and it threatens to become almost campy. The impact and power of the original sequence, had it been properly left alone, could conceivably have been one of the most impressively intense sequences, instead it simply wastes away as the rest of the film zaps its power.
The editing of The Deer Hunter is another problem, as the film could have used a more liberal cutter. I say this not because I have a short attention span, but rather because I felt the overlong sequences harmed the flow of the story to such a degree that it became irrelevant as to what culture was being introduced through the wedding and how these characters interacted. Instead of showing relationships, we’re shown drunken and stumbling men as they stagger through a ceremony and reception with a sort of pubescent and, at times, abusive glee. These aren’t heroes – and they don’t have to be – but it does make it hard to relate to the friendship involved when the friendship involved seems so….elongated by Cimino’s obsession with his own directorial nuances.
So yeah, there it is. The Deer Hunter is a well-acted but overly directed film that contains a meandering and stumbling plot, oft-wooden dialogue, cardboard characters, and an awful lot of wasted opportunities. It may well be a classic and for that reason alone it’s worth seeing, but without the performances within this film, it would have been a complete and total loss, I think. It’s very underwhelming.
5/10
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