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| Mike (Robert DeNiro) stalks a deer on his last hunting trip before shipping out to Vietnam. |
The Deer Hunter
Release Date: Dec. 8, 1978. Running Time: 184 minutes. Screenplay: Deric Washburn. Story: Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino, Louis A. Garfinkle, Quinn K. Redeker. Producer: Barry Spikings, Michael Deeley, Michael Cimino, John Peverall. Director: Michael Cimino.
THE PLOT:
Clairton, Pennsylvania steel worker Steve (John Savage) is getting married just before he and buddies Mike (Robert DeNiro) and Nick (Christopher Walken) are due to ship out to Vietnam. While Steve spends the weekend with his new bride, Mike and Nick join their other friends on one last hunting trip into the mountains.
Mike returns from the war, physically whole but feeling distant from his old life. He learns that Steve is alive and at a nearby VA hospital, but when he starts to call, he ends up putting the phone down. Meanwhile, a psychologically scarred Nick goes AWOL the day before he's supposed to go back home, vanishing without a trace.
Or so Mike believes, until the day that he finally brings himself to visit Steve. He discovers that his injured friend has been receiving shipments of cash from Saigon. There's only one explanation: Nick is still alive and still in Saigon. With the US soon to withdraw, that leaves only a short window for Mike to go back to Vietnam, to find Nick and bring him home.
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| Mike, Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steve (John Savage) stage a desperate escape. |
CHARACTERS:
Mike: The natural leader of the friend group, Mike takes charge both in the mountains when hunting and during the trio's escape from a Vietcong prison camp. DeNiro conveys the strength of a natural leader. Even more important to the film, he invests Mike with a certain soulfulness. DeNiro makes convincing a taciturn man who is awkward and uncertain in social situations, but absolutely in control in a crisis. He's also able to hint at Mike's psychological pain without a trace of histrionics. It's certainly no crime that Jon Voight won the Best Actor Oscar for his excellent work in Coming Home - but for my money, DeNiro's quiet, introspective performance here is even better.
Stan: In his final acting role, John Cazale is as excellent as ever, playing that member of the friend group who is more tolerated than actually liked. Stan is introduced preening into a mirror, much to his friends' amusement. During the hunting trip, he screams nasally at Mike for refusing to lend him hunting boots after forgetting his own. Despite his general obnoxiousness, there's always a sense of something more beneath the surface. After Mike's return, he seems more aware than some of the others that he isn't as "fine" as he pretends, something Cazale conveys entirely through glances and body language. Also, the night before his friends go off to war, Stan seems absolutely devastated, sitting at the piano of their favorite bar, staring into the distance with a truly stricken expression.
Nick: Mike's best friend and hunting partner. He's the most compassionate of the group, and it falls to him to make peace between Mike and Stan when they have their argument. In Vietnam, he refuses to let Mike abandon Steve when it looks like their friend might not make it. His empathic nature is probably what leads to him being so psychologically broken by their experiences. When a military doctor brusquely asks him to verify basic personal information, he freezes, unable to remember his parents' birthdates and seeming to struggle to even speak. It's a scene that Walken plays perfectly, with no trace of the overacting that he would later become known for.
Steven: The bridegroom is also the most vulnerable member of the group. At the wedding, he nervously confesses to the others that he and Angela have not yet consummated their relationship (though judging from the baby that we see after the return from war, that doesn't pose any problem after the ceremony). When the trio are captured, he fares the worst, literally crying out in terror while Mike and Nick do their best to remain calm. He attempts to hide from Angela after his return, apparently ashamed of his injuries, though he seems entirely mentally sound when Mike visits him.
Linda: Early scenes make it clear that, though she's in a relationship with Nick, there is a mutual if unspoken attraction between her and Mike. When Mike comes home without Nick, it doesn't take long before they are framed as a couple. She remains worried and anxious about Nick, but she does her best to behave normally. There's really only one scene in which she completely lets her guard down, when Mike drops by her work to find her sobbing uncontrollably in the back, even as she insists to him that she's fine. This and television miniseries Holocaust were Meryl Streep's breakthrough roles, and she is quietly excellent, earning emotion by convincingly playing someone who does as much as she can not to show what she's feeling.
John: Speaking of quietly excellent performances, George Dzundza makes memorable a character who, on the page, is one of the more peripheral members of the friend group. He runs the bar where they all hang out, and he comes across as a cheerful presence. He throws himself into dancing at Steve's wedding, and he's just as enthusiastic when bowling. There are two moments that show how affected he is by his friends' departure: the first, when he plays the piano beside Stan just before the trio ship out; and the second, when he's preparing breakfast for everyone and declines offers of help, only to go in the back and sob once he's completely alone.
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| Mike dances with Linda (Meryl Streep) at Steve's wedding. |
THOUGHTS:
For most of the 1970s, American cinema tended to shy away from directly tackling the war in Vietnam. By 1978, filmmakers and studios apparently decided that it was time to pick at the scab. That year saw two major releases, both dealing heavily with the pyschological impact of the war. The first was Coming Home, an antiwar drama that won Oscars for stars Jane Fonda and Jon Voight. The second film, the one which won Best Picture, was The Deer Hunter.
The Deer Hunter isn't overt in its politics the way Coming Home is. Its characters aren't political people. They are working class, mostly second-generation immigrants, working hard and living their lives day by day. Mike, Nick, and Steve don't seem motivated by patriotic fervor. There's not much sense that they're motivated by much. The war is there, and they go because they can't come up with any reason not to.
One of the more interesting qualities in The Deer Hunter is its pacing. Scenes set in Vietnam dominate the middle. This section is tightly-scripted and edited. The trio's imprisonment and escape create roughly thirty minutes of sustained tension, and there's not one wasted second in that extended sequence. This efficiency extends to the immediate aftermath, notably a sequence that follows Nick through what's meant to be his last day before returning home. Particularly on rewatch, this sequence uses a lot of the language of a thriller, with Nick given multiple opportunities to avoid what ends up befalling him.
Both the first and last hour are set mostly in the characters' hometown, Clairton. These scenes are anything but tight. This is particularly true of the first hour, which co-writer/director Michael Cimino allows to meander through their normal lives. The characters enjoy each other's company at a bar, celebrate at Steve's wedding, and go on their last big hunting trip, and this takes more than an hour of screen time.
From a narrative standpoint, this could fairly easily be cut in half. However, I think doing so would reduce the movie. By allowing the day of Steve's wedding to play out organically, the viewer is given a strong sense of the characters' relationships within the group. Critically, this opening Act is all about the characters. Even during the big set piece of Steve's wedding, the camera keeps moving from the activity back to the main characters. There are moments of humor, moments that show Mike's leadership role in the group, moments that foreshadow what these friends will soon suffer... and because it's allowed space to just unfold, even bits such as a veteran giving a succinct, two word answer to questions of what it's like in Vietnam feel not like dramatic scenes, but instead like things that just happen during the day that we observe.
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| Mike returns to the mountains to hunt, allowing cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond to create a moment of ethereal beauty. |
The entire film is wonderfully shot. Vilmos Zsigmond's BAFTA winning cinematography captures not only the settings, but their roles in the story. Mike's mountain refuge is beautiful, even ethereal. Clairton is naturalistic. The Vietnam scenes are harsher in their visual look, emphasized by lighting choices and a greater reliance on close-ups than in the rest of the film. When Mike returns to Vietnam to find Nick, that harshness is magnified. When he walks into the underground club that is Nick's refuge, there's a sense that Mike is making a journey into hell.
Given the cast, it's unsurprising that performances are superb from top to bottom. What is notable is how much both the actors and the movie resist any temptation toward histrionics. This extends to the ending, a ten minute epilogue that in some ways mirrors the expansive opening Act.
Like the rest of the film, there are no speeches made. The characters are striving for normality. They aren't indulging their emotions, they're trying to avoid them by focusing on mundane activity. Even the famous final moment, as the characters sing together, builds organically. They don't sing as a political statement. It's just a moment among people, one that's delivered haltingly and with a mix of emotions... which in itself is probably the most effective statement the movie could have chosen for its ending.
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| Mike and his friends gather at John (George Dzundza)'s bar. |
OVERALL:
A nitpick I have is not with the movie itself, but with its Blu-ray presentation. The film looks gorgeous, but its audio is muddled. I was surprised, as I'd seen it before on both VHS and television. I was actually driven to dig out my old videotape, and I can verify that the VHS has much clearer audio than the Blu-ray. I'm guessing an attempt at a Dolby "up-mix" turned into a "down-mix."
That aside, The Deer Hunter holds up as an excellent motion picture. It is not a realistic account of the War in Vietnam, something many others have critiqued at length... but since I don't think it's striving to be one, I find that entirely forgivable. The Vietnam sequence is a superb suspense piece, and the characters' psychological reactions feel realistic, and that's enough for me to believe in the drama.
It falls just short of full marks, mainly because I don't think it's quite at the level of the Best Picture Winners to which I have given the top score. But I'd still rate this as a very fine motion picture.
Rating: 9/10.
Best Picture - 1977: Annie Hall
Best Picture - 1979: Kramer vs. Kramer
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