The Deer Hunter (1978)

Friend­ships forged in the steel mills of Shit­wheel, Penn­syl­va­nia. Mon­ey earned for beer and broads, maybe also for firearms to per­fect killing wild ani­mals with a sin­gle pull of the trig­ger. Boom. One shot. Michael Cimi­no was instant­ly ele­vat­ed to the sta­tus of Tin­sel­town deity in the mid-’70s due to the suc­cess of The Deer Hunter, his widescreen, minor-key sym­pho­ny to the inno­cent, hon­est-to-good­ness work­ing class Mid­west­ern dream­ers who were packed off to ​’Nam to become can­non fod­der for Uncle Sam. If they didn’t return (at best) with miss­ing limbs or (at worst) in a met­al cas­ket, most like­ly the wires up-top were well-and-tru­ly frazzled.

Viewed today, the film comes across like Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Con­fused had that film con­tained a sec­ond act where Wood­er­son and co were all draft­ed into the US infantry then lat­er returned to Austin to con­tin­ue their annu­al haz­ing rit­u­als while on hero­in and with snub-nosed revolvers instead of hand-tooled wood­en paddles.

Yet where Linklater’s film gen­er­ates emo­tion from the bit­ter­sweet real­i­sa­tion that these char­ac­ters will live on and devel­op after the film has end­ed, The Deer Hunter is nov­el­is­tic and self-con­scious­ly epic, a self-con­tained tale in which things are said pri­mar­i­ly through fear that the audi­ence may con­coct a read­ing which doesn’t square with Cimino’s lofty, all-encom­pass­ing vision of man’s fate. Know this: out­side the time­line of The Deer Hunter and after the (sen­ti­men­tal) cred­its have rolled, noth­ing else of inter­est hap­pens to these characters.

The pro­longed wed­ding sequence at the start of the film remains its high­light, as it is the sole stretch of film where Cimi­no strains for real­ism rather than mean­ing. Indeed, these scenes smack of the democ­ra­tised-likes of Robert Alt­man, not mere­ly in the way the edit­ing impul­sive­ly switch­es between char­ac­ters and per­spec­tives, but also the wealth of nat­u­ral­is­tic back­ground detail.

The best shot in the entire film is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where the crowd are at one in fren­zied ela­tion at Angela and Steven’s union while an elder­ly cou­ple sit­ting alone on the periph­ery of the hall and – seem­ing­ly unprompt­ed – begin to kiss. Cimino’s knack for locat­ing poet­ry in pure, swirling tex­ture would come to full fruition two years late in by far his great­est achieve­ment, Heaven’s Gate.

All the cen­tral char­ac­ters are culled from a Russ­ian-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty, which would appear from some angles to be a provoca­tive choice of eth­nic­i­ty. Though the musi­cal reper­toire at the wed­ding is pre­dom­i­nate­ly made up of Russ­ian and Slav­ic folk songs, none of the char­ac­ters seem so in touch with their roots that they might ques­tion the Viet­nam war on an ide­o­log­i­cal level.

It’s as if the promise of Amer­i­ca is enough sub­sume any over­hang­ing polit­i­cal alle­giances. It’s also inter­est­ing the way in which Cimi­no presents hap­pi­ness and con­tent­ment with­in what is an out­ward­ly drea­ry social milieu, with Nick even stat­ing point-blank that he loves life in his home­town. There’s even an irony to the fact that it’s Russ­ian Roulette that becomes the group’s death sport of choice.

Talk­ing of which, there is a dark irony to the con­cept of a film about the dis­mal psy­cho­log­i­cal effects that come from the view­ing of extreme and ungoverned vio­lence, and the fact that it is clear­ly one of the film’s aims to employ imagery and sound which will pum­mel the view­er into sub­mis­sion. Cer­tain­ly, in a time when there’s a mar­ket val­ue in the cin­e­mat­ic race for world-beat­ing acts of revul­sion – like Pink Flamin­gos gone blue chip — the much vaunt­ed Russ­ian Roulette sequences per­haps don’t repel at quite the same lev­el they may have done to those for whom the thun­der of war was still ring­ing in the ears. But they are earnest­ly staged and, of the many chap­ters in this three-hour fea­ture, are pro­tract­ed as a way to gen­er­ate ten­sion rather than ladle-on texture.

Though the film is essen­tial­ly about the sud­den dis­so­lu­tion of the afore­men­tioned friend­ship, it’s Robert De Niro’s Mike who is the film’s cen­tral char­ac­ter, some­thing which is moot­ed dur­ing the first deer hunt sequence when he dash­es off for some solo shoot­ing, and then con­firmed in the final act where he takes on the task of attain­ing a post-war sta­tus update on his trag­ic pals Nick (Christo­pher Walken) and Steven (John Sav­age). This is not a work whose sub­texts and themes are hid­den par­tic­u­lar­ly well, and Nick and Steven are shown as the sor­ry vic­tims and in no uncer­tain terms.

It is, how­ev­er, De Niro’s char­ac­ter who is, in hind­sight, the most intrigu­ing of the three, as he’s the one on whom the harsh lega­cy of war has impart­ed the least direct effect. His impul­sive deci­sion to spare the life of a deer lat­er in the film may be the start of a new paci­fist streak, but it’s strange­ly upset­ting that a man could see all that he has seen and man­age to con­ceal the psy­cho­log­i­cal fall-out. Or, is his will­ing­ness to enter into a Russ­ian Roulette bout with Nick as a way to lure him back home even more crazy than the list­less sui­cid­ing of his smack-addled comrade?