“The Deer Hunter” is the third of three films about the Vietnam War on my screening list this year and I must admit that I haven’t had the best luck getting into this sub-genre. I found myself liking “Apocalypse Now!” enough for its epicness and just tolerated the dreary slog through “Platoon”, so I was looking to this flick to redeem the genre. It didn’t. I again find myself in a difficult interpretive position—how should I rate a film that has clear cinematic victories but that I could not stand to watch?
The movie opens with beautiful shots of Clairton, a gritty steel town in Pennsylvania. As we meet the characters, Director Michael Cimino contrasts their somewhat bleak industrial landscape with the characters’ joy of preparing for and celebrating a large Russian Orthodox wedding ceremony (ironic, and the first in a long list of contrasting imagery). This introduction goes on for nearly ONE HOUR. Seriously. I’m all for world building and character development, but this sequence makes Peter Jackson look conservative in the editing bay. The sequence finishes with a deer hunt before three of the guys prepare to ship off to Vietnam.
Act two then cuts to the war, where our boys are captured by the NVA troops. This is where the film’s most famous and challenging scenes are: Imprisoned in soul-crushing conditions, the POWs are forced to play a game of Russian Roulette by their cartoonishly evil North Vietnamese captors. This dramatic and heartbreaking scene is a brilliantly acted, somewhat on-the-nose metaphor for the low-value of life and randomness of death. The movie then returns to America where you get to see how each of the guys has been affected—mentally, physically, and emotionally—by their experience. We learn that De Niro’s Mike Vronsky no longer has his same zen-like passion for killing (deer). We also learn that Walken’s Nick Chevotarevich has been drugged and traumatized beyond recognition when Vronsky returns to Vietnam and casually searches for his friend DURING the fall of Saigon (officially where the film lost me).
Upon its release, “The Deer Hunter” was considered to be the best American epic since “The Godfather.” And I gotta admit, it has an epic scope, ambitious story, beautiful cinematography, full character arcs, excellent performances, and contains real deep, arty metaphors about the human condition. But unlike “The Godfather”, this film is hardly fascinating. It’s boring, and dreary, and self-important, and insincere, and incredulous. After 80 minutes of meandering around, the film relies on the intensity of a Russian Roulette scene to build tension and shock the audience. The film revisits this fatal game two more times, which is pretty exhaustive for an activity that has no evidence of actually occurring during the Vietnam War. Many forgive the film for this under the guise of artistic discretion; I couldn't believe it enough to do so.
Still, I think that “The Deer Hunter” is an excellent short film about two friends trapped in a game of Russian Roulette—surrounded by 165 minutes of drab fluff.