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Robert De Niro goes into a journey into the dark heart of America's Vietnam experience in The Deer Hunter |
Director: Michel Cimino
Cast: Robert De Niro (Mike Vronsky), Christopher Walken
(Nick Chevotarevich), John Savage (Steven Pushkov), John Cazale (Stan), Meryl
Streep (Linda), George Dzundza (John Welsh), Pierre Sagui (Julian Grinda),
Shirley Stoler (Steven’s mother), Chuck Aspregren (Peter Axelrod)
The Deer Hunter is
a mighty 1970s milestone of American cinema. Michael Cimino’s Vietnam story is
a big poetic epic – its plot is slim but it’s all about the atmosphere, and Cimino’s
understanding of the impact that the trauma of war has on different types of
men. For vast stretches of the film nothing much in particular happens,
followed by short, sharp bursts of gut-wrenching tension – but these have such
impact because we have taken the time to see these men’s ordinary lives.
Mike Vronsky (Robert De Niro), Nick Chevotarevich
(Christopher Walken) and Steve Pushkov (John Savage) are three Polish-American
friends working in a Pittsburgh steel yard, who have volunteered to serve in
Vietnam. Before they ship out, they celebrate Steve’s wedding, in a traditional
Polish ceremony, and go for one last deer hunt in the woods together – where
Mike outlines his philosophy of “one clean shot” (or “This is This”) and the near sacred experience of
man communing with nature and hunting. In Vietnam, the three friends are
captured by the Viet Cong and forced to take part in a chilling competition of Russian
roulette. The impact of these experiences changes their lives – and not for the
better – as they struggle to adjust as the war comes to an end.
Michael Cimino was seen at the time as the next great director.
This reputation lasted little more than two years, when the box office disaster
of his next film Heaven’s Gate (with
its tales of ludicrous excess and Cimino’s overly demanding perfectionism) led to
the destruction of a studio and effectively ended his career. To be honest, the
roots of all this are there in The Deer
Hunter. Cimino fought tooth and nail to prevent anything in the film being
cut – and he lucked out that he had a few supportive producers and a picture powered
by great performances and capturing something of the spirit of the age. Because
just this once, more was indeed more.
In some ways The Deer
Hunter is an over-indulgent mess. It’s very long, its plot is very slight, it’s
very pleased with itself, the camera dawdles for ages through first the friends
preparing for a wedding, the wedding itself and then a long hunting trip. This
takes up a solid opening hour and 15 minutes of this long film – and progresses
the plot forward very little other than establishing the characters and their
relationships. But somehow, despite this, the film is magnetic during this. I’m
almost not quite sure why, because nothing really happens at great length, but
there is a sort of poetic majesty about these sequences that just makes them
work.
It’s also a perfect entrée into our characters. After
basically sitting and watching them for over an hour do little more than live
their everyday lives, we really feel like we understand them. We know Mike is
distant, controlled, slightly repressed but prone to moments of exhibitionist
wildness that suggest primal, raging emotions beneath the surface. We also
understand, with his famous “this is this” speech (“what the fuck does that
mean?” his frustrated friend-cum-adversary Stan blurts out), that he is
reaching for some sort of symbolic, expressionist understanding of man’s place
in the world. He wants to be a poet but doesn’t have the abilities of
expression to achieve that.
Similarly, we see Nick as a more carefree, open spirit,
someone more in touch with expressing himself and more ready to seize life by the
horns. He’s also got a gentle, conciliatory quality to him – out of all the
characters, he fits most naturally into the role of confidante. Steven is a
child, just trying to do his best in the world, but too naïve for the grown-up
world. Most crucially we also see how they interact with each other, and how
they relate to women.
Most women in the film are clearly of very little importance
to the characters. Wives and girlfriends are very much on the outskirts of the
macho world of the steelyard. And they are of similarly little concern to the
men when they come home. Meryl Streep – excellent in an almost nothing part,
really it’s amazing how slimly this role is written – plays a woman torn
between feelings for Mike and Nick, but the men’s feelings for her waver between
uncertainty, indifference and confused affection. Barely any other woman gets a
look in, certainly not Steve’s wife who is treated with open suspicion as some
sort of floozy.
All this thematic manly matiness then explodes in the later
acts of the film, as the after-impact of war – and PTSD, although the word is
never used – hits our characters square in the face. And there are few things
that will hit you as square on as a bullet. Cimino of course faced waves of
criticism about his inclusion of the grisly gambit (no evidence that it was
used by the Viet Cong) – but as a metaphor for going to war, and the trauma it
will do to your mind, there are few things better than a “sport” which involves
placing a gun to your head and pulling the trigger.
These scenes are already tension-inducing to watch (you
can’t help but put yourself in the shoes of the men putting that gun to their
heads and wondering if they’ll hear a click or nothing ever again) but Cimino
ramps up the pressure here, helped by truly powerhouse performances by De Niro,
Walken and Savage. The unbelievable intensity of these scenes, and the total
gear shift from everything you’ve seen up to this point in the movie, is a
justification of Cimino’s slow pace earlier. After a luxurious opening sequence
where we’ve watched the guys fool around, dance, sing and play pool, to
suddenly be thrown into this grim, despairing, terrifying situation works
brilliantly.
No wonder the rest of the film feels as much in shock as the
characters do. Walken is exceptional (and Oscar-winning) as the sensitive soul
whose spirit and will to live are destroyed by the incident, who no longer sees
any point going home and barely even (by the end) seems to remember who or what
he was. Cimino even makes the film feel colder, drabber and chillier in the
third act back in Pittsburgh, following Mike’s return home – and his utter inability
to deal with his experiences or communicate the horrors of what he has gone
through to his friends.
This is also where the film gains immeasurably from a truly
sublime performance from De Niro as Mike. In any other actor’s career, this
performance would be the stand-out,
so it says a lot for De Niro that it’s so often overlooked. But he underplays
to devastating effect, as an inarticulate, slightly shy man who has a sheen of
confidence, who will do what it needs to survive, who has a poetry and power of
love in him that he can’t really express or understand. De Niro is truly
brilliant in this film, a still centre that bears almost the total weight of
Cimino’s thematic intentions. Essentially De Niro kinda plays an everyman
Vietnam vet, and the burden of a
whole country after the war without ever having the release of fireworks. He’s
excellent.
But then the whole film is a little bit excellent. The Deer Hunter is a masterpiece of a
sort, a compelling, dark, tragic and unsettling piece of poetic moviemaking.
Saying that, there’s something uncomfortable in its depiction of its non-American
characters – to a man they are all violence loving degenerates – but then in a
film that focuses on the unsettling experience of these Hicksville Americans in
a land they don’t understand and can’t deal with, this is at least justifiable
in a sense. The Deer Hunter’s main
problem at points is that it is a rather pompous, pleased with itself film, but
it’s not so much the story that is so strong here but the telling – and
Cimino’s telling is first class.
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