Overall Rating
  Awesome: 60.43%
Worth A Look: 22.3%
Average: 5.76%
Pretty Bad: 10.07%
Total Crap: 1.44%
5 reviews, 109 user ratings
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| Deer Hunter, The |
by Zarathustra
"Intriguing and often gripping movie, yet somehow lacking"
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Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter won a slew of Oscars, including Best Picture, but twenty years later the movie's shortcomings are apparent. It's a fine, intelligent, and exciting war drama about friends who go off to fight in Vietnam, but the emphasis is more on the fearful anticipation and the painful aftermath of combat rather than the combat itself.The movie is divided into three acts. First, we see a group of American friends (Pennsylvanian??) on their last night together before some of them head off to war. They spend their final hours getting drunk, partying, hunting (if I recall correctly, their deer hunt gives the film it's title), hanging out--but there's tension, of course, and foreboding. These are just normal working class guys who don't necessarily want to fight. There's a natural camaraderie among the characters as portrayed by Robert De Niro (the central character), John Cazale, Christopher Walken, John Savage, and George Dzundza. A young, attractive, and remarkably "un-actressy" Meryl Streep also makes an appearance.
The quiet working-class naturalism of the first act makes the second act in Vietnam seem very strange. For what we see is not a "realistic" depiction of the Vietnam war, not at all. It looks like it at first, but it's not. When the protagonists (Walken, De Niro, Cazale) get taken hostage, their Vietnamese captors force them into a game of Russian roulette. You either die for certain or take a chance and possibly come out alive. Of course, these scenes are gripping to watch (somebody has to live, somebody die), but they don't have anything to do with reality. The Russian Roulette game becomes a refrain through the rest of the movie: you'd think from seeing The Deer Hunter that this was an obsession of the Vietnamese, when it's really just a device Cimino uses to heighten the drama, as well as a metaphor for the war, I guess. It's hard to articulate what's wrong with this metaphor. It's not just that Russian Roulette is a fantasy device here, a bit of sleight of hand with no historical basis, it's that it clashes with the naturalistic tone already established. It doesn't take on any truly ominous significance, either: the metaphor is never fully developed, or developed at all really. It's just there--it's what everyone remembers about the movie--to a large extent it IS the movie, because it comes to dominate the action entirely. I don't remember any battle sequences in the movie, I just remember one Russian Roulette game after another. Cimino seems confused about what he's doing, he can't invest the Russian Roulette with symbolic significance because he doesn't know quite what he's trying to say.
In the third act, De Niro returns home and tries to resume his normal life. A romance with Meryl Streep blossoms, and the two do have chemistry together. Streep is very good here in an understated way, before she became overpraised for a strident, excessively mannered technique. Walken doesn't make it out of Vietnam, but De Niro finally returns in a coda to find out what happened to his friend: is Walken dead or alive? I won't describe what happens in the finale, but I will say I found it confusing and not quite successful.
This is a movie well worth seeing. It's quite well-acted, especially by Walken and Streep, but ultimately the symbols and visual motifs don't amount to anything. They obscure more than they illuminate. The title itself is as frustrating as anything else. "The Deer Hunter": what does the title mean? Well, we know these guys enjoy hunting: they bond over a dead deer. Presumably De Niro is the "deer hunter" of the title. Beyond that, are we supposed to understand something about the death of innocence, is "deer hunting" supposed to act as a metaphor for the Vietnam war? Is "the deer hunter" supposed to be a phrase that resonates? For me, it doesn't. The whole movie was by turns exciting, engrossing and touching, but it didn't linger in the memory.The Deer Hunter is overlong, clocking in at about three hours, and it's not really a realistic portrait of Vietnam, but it's weirdly entertaining nonetheless. I don't think this review has really done it justice, but I can't put it any better.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1366&reviewer=213
originally posted: 05/28/00 18:14:54
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USA
02-Feb-1979 (R)
DVD: 06-Sep-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
02-Jul-1979 (R)
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