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Alright, this one is a repeat watch, a film I viewed 20+ years ago on a little 20-inch CRT television and therefore it can hardly be said that I watched it at all. I decided the 1978 Best Picture winner deserved another day in court, on a proper widescreen TV in hi-def. So here we are, let's talk about The Deer Hunter.
Directed and co-written by Michael Cimino and starring Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage and Meryl Streep, The Deer Hunter is an epic drama, part war film, part study of late 60s working class America. It's divided into three distinct acts, the first of which takes place over the course of two days and centers around the wedding of the Savage character Steve, who along with Mike (De Niro) and Nick (Walken) are set to ship off to Vietnam a few days later. We spend a lot of time with this group of friends and the film takes its time world-building via the wedding sequence, a scene in the local bar, and a hunting trip the group takes in the mountains. Act two is set in Vietnam, where the three friends are reunited and quickly captured by the Viet Cong, and forced to play Russian roulette. This absolutely harrowing sequence is the film's centerpiece and serves as a metaphor for the war itself, changing the characters and their circle of friends forever. Act three is the aftermath of the war. Mike has returned home a hero but can't seem to reassimilate into civilian life, Steve is wheelchair-bound and his wife is unable to cope, and Nick has gone AWOL and is still in Saigon, now a professional Russian roulette player with PTSD.
The film is very effective at immersing us in this western Pennsylvania community, where the only decent job in town is at the steel mill, the guys have their simple rituals of heading to the dive bar after work and getting sloshed on Rolling Rock beer, and their big ticket leisure activity is deer hunting. It's a simple but comfortable life for these folks, and it's all shattered by the war, even for those who didn't enlist. Mike courageously muscles through these life-altering experiences and their consequences, but even he isn't fully able to go home again, as it were.
The scenes in Vietnam are sort of a mixed bag; we're thrust into the middle of the war without much to establish what Mike's situation is, he miraculously runs into his old friends Nick and Steve, and all three are quickly captured. This part of the second act felt rushed to me, like it were just a quick setup for the Russian roulette sequence. The film's most famous scene is startlingly well done; the actors were actually locked in an underwater cage on the River Kwai and apparently one of the jailers actually despised Americans, thus he was easily able to get into this abusive character. There was understandably much controversy over the portrayal of the Viet Cong as sadistic torturers, particularly since no actual evidence exists of any American soldiers being forced to play Russian roulette for their captors' amusement. Indeed, the original script was set in Las Vegas in an underworld gambling circuit. Cimino's intention was for this plot device to be metaphorical of course, though Nick's subsequent addiction to the game and success playing it seems a bit unlikely. Russian roulette is after all entirely a game of morbid chance. But the prison scene itself is brutally effective, aided by the filmmakers' insistence on stark realism.
The performances are all very naturalistic. De Niro is a tough, taciturn figure whose friends all look up to him. Walken has the film's most compelling arc, going from a wide-eyed optimist to a hopelessly broken man (He'd go on to win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar). Streep was a relative newcomer in 1977 but already displayed the early stages of her legendary chops.
Overall I appreciated The Deer Hunter much more on the second viewing and had much more patience for its deliberate pacing. The visuals obviously came across much better on a big TV than on my tiny old one, and thus the experience was much more immersive. The film still feels a bit untidy at times and the script could've been tightened up a little. Character motivations and interactions are sometimes owed to contrivance and we simply have to accept them to move the story along. For example, having promised Nick he'd never leave him in Vietnam, why after the first time running into him at a gambling den does Mike not make a greater effort to bring him home?
I give the film ***1/2 out of ****.
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