The Deer Hunter (1978)
Decided to start watching all of the Oscar best picture winners, in order. I hadn’t heard of some of these movies, some I love and have seen multiple times already and I actively hate others, planning to never watch them again. Fair warning, there will be spoilers in these and other reviews to help explain my point of view.
Released three years after the end of the Vietnam conflict, The Deer Hunter tells the story of a group of friends from a small steel-working town in Pennsylvania and the experiences of three of them in Vietnam. Robert De Niro (Mike), Christopher Walken (Nick) and John Savage (Steven) are the three who go off to fight. It isn’t clear if they were drafted or volunteered, but they seem happy to join the conflict and help the U.S. win. Right from the beginning, you fear for what will happen to them because we, the audience, know how terrible it was for everyone in Vietnam and that even if they make it home alive, they will never be the same.
Yet another war film that won Best Picture, The Deer Hunter is definitely one of the most harrowing and hard to watch, but not all of that is due to it’s subject matter. The film definitely drives home the fact that war really is hell, but I think it fails in actually capturing the conflict; instead it focuses on the tortures solders may have received while in country. This, despite the fact that the Russian roulette that is focused on so heavily may not have actually happened to anyone, or most likely didn’t occur with the frequency the filmmakers want you to accept. This is truly all we ever see in the scenes set in Vietnam; the movie abruptly cuts from a scene in a bar where their friend John, played by George Dzundza, plays the piano to seeing Mike and Steven as POWs forced to paly Russian roulette. Out of nowhere, Nick shows up and eventually the three escape, but not together. When Mike goes back to Vietnam to rescue Nick from what I can only refer to as professional Russian roulette, that is still all we really see. Oh, I forgot about a couple of scenes in a hospital and a brothel, but that’s actually it.
It is this and other similar jarring jumps, without any clarity on the passage of time or what is actually happening, as well as the horrible sound editing, that make the film hard to watch. Most of the dialogue in the first hour, where we are tortured with what has to be the longest and most boring wedding ever put to film, is unintelligible. Even closed captioning can’t decipher it all. According to Wikipedia, Steven’s wife Angela is pregnant with another man’s child, but if the movie itself told me that, I didn’t hear it. There is also drama because Nick and Mike live together and are both in love with Linda (Meryl Streep) who is Nick’s girlfriend. She is also being abused by her alcoholic father. None of these character beats matter though, because nothing becomes of them. Linda asks to move in with Mike and Nick due to the abuse, but since they are in Vietnam a couple of scenes later, it doesn’t matter. The paternity of Angela’s child is also unimportant, again due to his abrupt departure for Vietnam and his not showing up again until after Nick dies. There are simply so many gaps in the storytelling that it is hard to genuinely feel anything; there is no lead-up, things just happen.
The only thing allowed to simmer was the overlong wedding at the beginning, which lasted over 30 minutes, and the hunting scene that took place the next day. Even that didn’t do what the filmmakers wanted it to, which I assume is give us some insight into the characters of Mike and Nick, since they are on the hunting trip while Steven is with his new wife. There needed to be more actual conversation, not grown men yelling over each other like little boys, for that to happen. I just wanted to get through all of that and finally get to Vietnam, but that disappointed also as stated above. I can’t care about characters I don’t know and even though this movie is over three hours long, I didn’t know any more about any of the characters than I did when the movie ends, except that Nick was so messed up by his experience, that he chose death over help and returning home. The movie’s ending was also a let-down. Since Mike and Nick play each other in the final round, we know one of them is going to die and since Nick is pretty much a lost cause, it’s a pretty safe bet it will be him. When we’re back in the States for his funeral, again, there isn’t much dialogue, just long silences that end with the gang sitting in their bar singing “God Bless America”. What?? Why?? What was the point of that?? America did nothing for Nick or for any of them, really. Is that supposed to be irony? Am I giving this film too much credit? My head hurts. The director has been quoted as saying this scene was meant to evoke a sense of community, the coming togther that people need at times of grief. I understand that, but why this song, of all the songs in the world? An absolutely tone-deaf choice. If Nick had actually died a war hero or in the heat of battle, maybe, but he didn’t. The government’s misguided decision to enter into the Vietnam conflict is what led to his destruction and death; why glorify that in the end?
I completely understand why this movie won so may awards, but subject matter aside, I don’t think it is deserving. It is essentially a well-acted, but otherwise poorly made film. The script is pretty bare in terms of dialogue and it feels cobbled together, as if the wrong things were cut in order to get it down to three hours. I may be wrong, but if lesser actors had been in this film, I don’t think it would have achieved the acclaim it did. On the merits of the acting alone, I give this 1.5 out of 5 stars. There simply isn’t enough going on otherwise for me to give it more than that.
