January 18, 2009
"The Deer Hunter" is split up into three clearly defined sections, each running about an hour in length. The first is a sort of calm before the storm - we're guests at the wedding of Steven (John Savage) and his bride. Not only is it a celebration of the union of marriage, it's a...( read more) sort of departing ceremony for Steven and two of his best friends, Nick (Christopher Walken) and Michael (Robert De Niro), who will be going to Vietnam shortly. We meet these three, as well as a few more of their friends who work at a steel mill in Pennsylvania, and then follow them on a hunting trip up in the mountains. The wedding scene gets the most generous amount of time devoted to it, and as an anthropological observer we're kept arms distance from the festivities. It's hard to enjoy this party, afterall, as we know the threats of Vietnam linger. This section ends as the three watch their friend play a moving piece on the piano, which suddenly turns to the sight of hell: gunfire, explosions, and the grating sound of helicopter blades.
Director Michael Cimino thrusts us right into the midst of the Vietnam war, and we see the familiar, yet broken, faces of the people who celebrated just minutes previous. Shortly thereafter, the three are all taken as prisoners and held in barbed wire cages. One by one, people are removed from this cage to be forcefully engaged in games of Russian roulette. The rules are simple: there's one bullet in a gun, and you pull the trigger to your head. One out of six times, of course, you will die. Meanwhile, the captors cheer on and place bets on who lives and who dies. Russian roulette becomes a common image in the film, which is representative of the war itself and the lives it gambles away.
In the third act, we mostly follow Michael, who was the most composed and grounded in the horrific Vietnam sequences. Only on the outside, however, did he retain his composure. Now a broken shell of himself, he returns home all alone. He'll soon find out that Steven has also returned (not all of Steven, however, as he lost two legs), but Nick is nowhere to be found. Michael, guilty, knows he must return to Vietnam as he suspects Nick has gotten involved with the same horrific game they were forced to play as prisoners.
"The Deer Hunter" is considered a classic war film, and it's not hard to see why. Not only is it a piece with a number of excellent performances, including Meryl Streep and John Cazale along with the three main protagonists, but it's one of the more disturbing and unconventional war films you'll find. What's so refreshing about "The Deer Hunter" as a war film is that it skips most of the battle. Vietnam, in this film, is largely kept to a small room and a cage. Nevertheless, this is still one of the most horrifying looks at the brutality of war, and the complete abandonment of compassion in the relentless face of oppression. It's not anti or pro U.S., but it's absolutely anti-war. The Russian roulette scene is something that you won't soon forget.
Despite all of it's upsides, however, there were a few things about the film that I didn't completely buy. First and foremost, I found that the last third of the film was especially weak. The only change that was fascinating was Michael's, and that's because it was the most subtle. A paraplegic and someone driven to insanity just seems to underplay what you think the film would be about - the inability to recover from living through such tragedies. Here, Michael is the only character with the mental burden, as the other two are clearly now mentally unfit.
Perhaps the most common criticism of the film, the absurdity behind the logic of Nick's survival over time, is justified. The rest of the film is completely engrossing, but I found myself gaining an unnecessary amount of distance from the material in the third act due to some questionable plot developments. Finally, I found the ending of the film to be awful. The singing of "God Bless America" seems to be an ironic symbol of mindless patriotism, and it's by far the least subtle thing of the film. Having watched a horrifying story for three hours, the consequences of war on soldiers didn't need to be hamfisted any further. While the last scene fits, it's so uncharacteristically dumb and obvious for an otherwise very good film.
I was slightly disappointed with "The Deer Hunter" due to the weak last third of the film, but it's still an endlessly fascinating piece. It's also quite the compliment to mention that it doesn't feel nearly as long as it's three hour runtime. This is a slightly overrated, but still a very worthwhile film.
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