The Deer Hunter (18.)
Directed by Michael Cimino. 1978.
Starring Robert De Niro, John Cazale, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, John Savage and George Dzunda. 182 mins.
Like Saturday Night Fever, The Deer Hunter is a film that is embedded in its time. Not dated or discredited but something that only makes sense in that 70s context. Yet in one way its take on Vietnam is the truest and most perceptive of any of the Nam film – as long as they remain in America everything goes swimmingly but the moment they get to Nam the whole thing turns into an inconceivable shambles and even when they make it back to the States they can't get back to what they once had.
That first hour though could parade around naked alongside any of the Godfathers or Scorsese classic without a hint of self consciousness. It is magnificent. Following three friends who work in a small town steel mill in Pennsylvania on the day one of them gets married and the eve of them shipping out to Vietnam, it is a piece of social realism pitched on an epic scale. In domestic terms it is like a hybrid of Mike Leigh and David Lean.
What follows is just ridiculous – trying to encapsulate a war into a series of Russian Roulette games really beggars belief; it is like making a film about football that only has penalty shootouts, you're concentrating on a contrived and arbitrary drama while all around you there is real and compelling tension.
(The genesis of the film was a script about Russian Roulette, The Man Who Came To Play, which had no connection to Vietnam, or any other war.)
The cast is magnificent, especially those not tainted by the Vietnam sequence. De Niro doesn't really have a character to play, just an idealised hero figure but he was so compelling back in those days you barely notice. Walken won an Oscar for his role as the one who stays behind to make a go of it as a full time Russian Roulette and as a result is probably the least convincing of all of them.
After the flop and indulgence of his subsequent film Heaven's Gate, Cimino became Hollywood's Designated Idiot, the one that everybody could safely direct all the scorn and derision generated by the other egotistical monsters directing movies in Hollywood. His career never recovered. The Deer Hunter is an inscrutable film – is it racist? Jingoistic? Is the final scene ironic or heartfelt? And its director is just as enigmatic. Was he actually any good or did he just get lucky? Parts of this film and his previous film, the Clint Eastwood/ Jeff Bridges vehicle Thunderbolt and Lightfoot suggest he must have had something: all the subsequent ones point to a total charlatan. Cimino was variously labelled racist, fascist and communist over his career. In that way he is the archetypal Hollywood director – if it looks great, the ideology can take care of itself.
Directed by Michael Cimino. 1978.
Starring Robert De Niro, John Cazale, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, John Savage and George Dzunda. 182 mins.
Like Saturday Night Fever, The Deer Hunter is a film that is embedded in its time. Not dated or discredited but something that only makes sense in that 70s context. Yet in one way its take on Vietnam is the truest and most perceptive of any of the Nam film – as long as they remain in America everything goes swimmingly but the moment they get to Nam the whole thing turns into an inconceivable shambles and even when they make it back to the States they can't get back to what they once had.
That first hour though could parade around naked alongside any of the Godfathers or Scorsese classic without a hint of self consciousness. It is magnificent. Following three friends who work in a small town steel mill in Pennsylvania on the day one of them gets married and the eve of them shipping out to Vietnam, it is a piece of social realism pitched on an epic scale. In domestic terms it is like a hybrid of Mike Leigh and David Lean.
What follows is just ridiculous – trying to encapsulate a war into a series of Russian Roulette games really beggars belief; it is like making a film about football that only has penalty shootouts, you're concentrating on a contrived and arbitrary drama while all around you there is real and compelling tension.
(The genesis of the film was a script about Russian Roulette, The Man Who Came To Play, which had no connection to Vietnam, or any other war.)
The cast is magnificent, especially those not tainted by the Vietnam sequence. De Niro doesn't really have a character to play, just an idealised hero figure but he was so compelling back in those days you barely notice. Walken won an Oscar for his role as the one who stays behind to make a go of it as a full time Russian Roulette and as a result is probably the least convincing of all of them.
After the flop and indulgence of his subsequent film Heaven's Gate, Cimino became Hollywood's Designated Idiot, the one that everybody could safely direct all the scorn and derision generated by the other egotistical monsters directing movies in Hollywood. His career never recovered. The Deer Hunter is an inscrutable film – is it racist? Jingoistic? Is the final scene ironic or heartfelt? And its director is just as enigmatic. Was he actually any good or did he just get lucky? Parts of this film and his previous film, the Clint Eastwood/ Jeff Bridges vehicle Thunderbolt and Lightfoot suggest he must have had something: all the subsequent ones point to a total charlatan. Cimino was variously labelled racist, fascist and communist over his career. In that way he is the archetypal Hollywood director – if it looks great, the ideology can take care of itself.
