Film Review: The Deer Hunter

Director: Michael Cimino

The 1978 American war epic has always been a hugely polarizing movie, it ranks as one of the greatest movies of all time amongst many film fans whilst others criticize it for its inaccurate and racist portrayal of the Vietnamese as well as using Russian Roulette as the centrepiece. Kermode described it as one of the worst movies of all-time for being "farcically melodramatic and ramblingly self-indulgent". The films run time of three hours certainly gives the film plenty of time to breathe with only the opening wedding scene in the first act coming across as bloated on review.

Mike (Robert De Niro) playing the infamous Russian Roulette

Many felt Cimino struck lucky on this film due to the incredibly poor performance of his movies since especially the sprawling Western epic Heavens Gate which like The Deer Hunter came in massively over budget but bombed at the box office. His reputation never really recovered and he was left with just one great picture on his resume. In the production of The Deer Hunter there is the signs of a director who didn't have control over budgets and shooting, many things seemed to be done at the last minute on a whim and it was the actors who put in great performances to make the movie work.

Steven (John Savage) is due to get married, he is berated by his mother over not wearing a scarf to the wedding at the Orthodox church in the town of Clairton, Pennsylvania. His friends Mike (Robert De Niro) and Nick (Christopher Walken) have also both enlisted into the army as well to fight the war in Vietnam. Mike also has a secret crush on Nick's girlfriend Linda (Meryl Streep) which is an underlying story as the film progresses. After the wedding and subsequent party finishes we see Mike perform the ''one shot'' that is discussed at the beginning of the film killing a deer, in a snap the film moves to Vietnam where they are fighting the Vietcong and being subjected to the horrors of war.

Mike with Nick (Christoper Walken) and Steven (John Savage)

The ugly side of war is often displayed in movies, a glut of movies followed this about the effects of war on the human mind and body. Even before this there was such films as All Quiet on the Western Front (the original anti-war film made before the Second World War) and Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick. The Deer Hunter was the anti-war movie for a new era as America finally started to move on from the failure of the Vietnam war. The psychological effects are brutal and the many critics who questioned the Russian Roulette scenes at the beginning of the movie have missed the metaphor for war that this game presents. Signing up to the army during a war and surviving that war alive is more down to luck than anything and even if you do survive then you are still scarred for life.

As stated above, the acting performances within the movie are what make this film so shocking and intense. Robert De Niro is at his very best as the leader of their small group, he looks after Nick and Steven as well as their friends who stayed in Clairton during the war. Christopher Walken is excellent as the emotionally vulnerable Nick whilst Meryl Streep is also impressive as Linda in the role that thrust her into prominence. The joking and camaraderie between the main characters is genuine and heart felt which makes the following events more difficult to take, the Russian Roulette scene in the rudimentary prison in Vietnam is one of the most tense and un-nerving I've ever watched. Whilst the ending is equally compelling and heart wrenchingly somber.

3.5/4 Disturbing war epic that made the mould for all the Vietnam films that followed