The Deer Hunter
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"A classic of New Hollywood cinema, Michael Cimino’s powerful anti-war epic summons a trio of intense, terrific performances from its stars Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep. Cimino’s breakthrough, and winner of five Academy Awards® including Best Picture."
— MUBI's take
The Deer Hunter
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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The Deer Hunter is a 1978 American epic war drama film co-written and directed by Michael Cimino about a trio of Slavic-American steelworkers whose lives are upended after fighting in the Vietnam War. The three soldiers are played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage, with John Cazale (in his final role), Meryl Streep and George Dzundza in supporting roles. The story takes place in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a working-class town on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh, and in Vietnam.
Why It Rocks
- Michael Cimino saw The Deer Hunter as an opportunity to remove the Vietnam War from a debate between liberals and conservatives, in effect to refight it on his own terms. The story would try to make hippies and rednecks irrelevant, to deemphasize the government’s motives and tactics in favor of the patriotism and heroism of the soldiers involved. Cimino built his story around six friends in a Pennsylvania steel town; three go to war, but all must face consequences. Or, in the director’s metaphor, all must play Russian roulette in one form or another.
- The film's said to be about many subjects: male bonding, mindless patriotism, the dehumanizing effects of war, Nixon's "silent majority". Any of those subjects could work, but more than anything else, it is a heartbreakingly effective fictional machine that evokes the agony of the Vietnam time.
- According to Cimino, "the war is really incidental to the development of the characters and their story. It’s a part of their lives and just that, nothing more." Indeed, Vietnam is a very important episode in the lives of the film’s male protagonists: friends Michael, Stan, Steven, Nick, John and Axel. The film's told in three major movements, as a progression from a wedding to a funeral. Its not anti-war or pro-war; it’s the harrowing tale of a group of three friends from Pennsylvania (Michael, Nick and Steven) who work in a steel mill and prepare to serve in Vietnam. It serves as the records of how various lives had been altered terribly forever -- including the male friend trio. Michael's the one who somehow finds the strength to keep going and to keep Nick and Steven going. He survives the prison camp and helps the others.
- In spite of there being few extended sequences of dialogue, the film's richly detailed with realistic scenes of interaction between the protagonists. The film is structured around the metaphor of 'deer-hunting' - both from the viewpoint of the hunter and from the perspective of the game target.
- Rather than jumping straight to the war and providing a quick introduction for its main characters, the movie takes its time with its opening scenes, with the steel mill and the saloon and especially with the wedding and the party in the American Legion Hall. This allows the audience to not just get to know the characters, but also feel absorbed in their lives and actually be invested, so that when the war happens and half of the friend group suffers from it, it's that much more depressing.
- While John Savage (Steven) and Christopher Walken (Nick) had been involved with acting for a while, their appearances in this film helped define their future careers.
- A key piece of the film features a memorable, yet horrifying sequence, as Michael, Nick and Steven are taken prisoner and forced to play Russian roulette while their captors gamble on who will, or won't, blow out his brains. The game of Russian roulette becomes the organizing symbol of the film: Anything you can believe about the game, about its deliberately random violence, about how it touches the sanity of men forced to play it, will apply to the war as a whole. It is a brilliant symbol because, in the context of this story, it makes any ideological statement about the war superfluous.
- Working with Zsigmond, among the most talented cinematographers of his time, Cimino achieved a layered visual style dense with information. His frames are as crammed with people and props as a Sternberg movie. Cimino the writer thinks in operatic terms, inflating the mundane to high emotion, turning pop ephemera into spiritual epiphanies. When he is on, the effect is uncanny. A mentally disturbed Nicky lurches into the Saigon strip joint, with Gladys Knight and the Pips' "Midnight Train to Georgia" barely discernible on the soundtrack. The lyrics match not only Nicky's mood, but his place in the narrative.
- Cimino strips away what doesn't interest him, focusing -- at length -- on moments of intense emotion. He is also masterful with sweeping gestures -- a parade of refugees on a dirt road, body bags and coffins lined up in a hospital courtyard, the flood of humanity on a Saigon street at night. As well as anyone in his period, he knew how to operate the machinery of filmmaking.
Bad Qualities
- There are few extended sequences of dialogue, although the film is richly detailed with realistic scenes of interaction between the protagonists. The film is structured around the metaphor of 'deer-hunting' - both from the viewpoint of the hunter and from the perspective of the game target.
- Director Cimino was criticized as distortedly and one-sidedly portraying all the Vietnamese characters in the film as despicable, sadistic racists and killers. (Plus, during the 'Russian Roulette' sequence, none of the words of the Vietcong were subtitled, helping to dehumanize them.) According to the director, the film was not political, polemical, literally accurate, or posturing for any particular point of view. During an interview, Cimino allegedly claimed that he had Singapore news clippings that confirmed Russian roulette existed during the war, but they were never conclusively identified.
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