The Deer Hunter

(1978)

Directed by

Michael Cimino

Review by Zach Saltz

Calling Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) a war movie would be a slight misnomer, since the key events of the story occur off the battlefield, where the most powerful and dangerous maneuvers are expressed not with artillery, but through paralyzing silences and painful encounters.

It is certainly one of the most realistic stories ever filmed about war and its sobering effects.  Part of its realism is its presentation of characters -- average, hard-working coal miners from a small town in Pennsylvania.  There is no real main character, but the audience probably identifies most with the character of Mike Vronsky (Robert De Niro) who appears to be the group’s unofficial leader.  He helplessly and silently pines for Linda (Meryl Streep), the wife of his best buddy, Nick (Christopher Walken, in an Academy Award-winning performance).  He, along with Nick and another buddy, Steven, have signed up for the army.  They do not feel strongly about politics or patriotism; they are hearty blue-collar boys who work long hours in the mines and drink beer and go deer hunting on the weekends.  There is no need for writer-director Cimino to intricately draw out nuances in the characters; they are universal -- caricatures, perhaps, of the way “innocent” small-town America behaved before the unforgiving realities of war and death would resonate in the mid-1970s. 

The movie is divided into three parts: Before Vietnam, during Vietnam, and after Vietnam.  The first portion is the most meticulously established; the look and feel of the bravura thirty-minute Russian wedding sequence avoids any maligned “ethnic apathy” and feels astonishingly real -- this scene will become the impetuous to tragic nostalgia entering the men’s minds, as they helplessly yearn to return to that life while struggling to maintain sanity in the midst of war.  The Vietnam scenes are positively wrenching; there is an extended sequence when the soldiers must play Russian Roulette with a revolver to determine whether they will live or not.  The game becomes a cruel central element of the story, symbolizing the fragile bond between life and sudden death in a land of senseless warfare and killings.  And the final act is subtle and somber -- returning to a life that will never again look the same, and attempting, with futility, to fulfill the lost promises of the best of youth.

What is most fascinating and significant about The Deer Hunter, as it relates to the unit on sound, is how the happy dancing and music of the wedding and loud explosions and gun blasts of Vietnam are contrasted with the later excruciating silences that separate Mike from his life before the war, after he returns home.  There is a scene shortly after he returns home where he stands and contemplates in the dark of a hotel room while the camera silently focuses on him, and this essentially sums up the impenetrable and morose feelings of every veteran returning home for the first time (and also shows the depths and raw emotion of De Niro’s masterful performance).  The agonizingly beautiful score, by Stanley Meyers, swells only at moments where the characters (and the audience) yearn most to return to the gay merriment of that Russian wedding that took place only 45 minutes earlier, but feels like many days and weeks ago.   And music especially plays an integral key in the film’s final moments, where the characters find themselves singing a particular well-known song that elicits more strong feelings in them certainly than any time previously in their lives. 

One question that often pops into a viewer’s head while watching a war movie is whether the film is pro-war or anti-war.  Truffaut famously wrote that it was impossible to make an anti-war film, since any war film, no matter what its message, was sure to be exhilarating, caught up in the spectacle of gunfire and explosions and heroics.  But with films like The Deer Hunter, war is never glamorized but shown as a senseless, purposeless exercise in suffering and heartbreak.  What is the point of it then?  Is there ever meaning or fulfilling in killing something for any sort of artificial “greater good”?  When, at the end of this great and powerful film, Mike points his gun at a deer on his last hunting trip and spares its precious life, the viewer knows immediately that this is exactly what he’s thinking.

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