The Deer Hunter

The last Best Picture winner I watched before this was The Best Years Of Our Lives, a movie released the year after World War 2, which examined the effect of the war on the returning soldiers and the people at home. While it was released during the height of the Hays Code, and at a time when patriotic spirit was at an all-time high, it still managed to thread the needle in tackling its weighty subject. It may not be as brutally honest as, say, Jacob's Ladder, but is gets the ball over the finish line, so to speak. I can, then, only assume that in 1978, after the USA got its ass kicked and sent packing from Vietnam, that it needed coddling, and thus, it latched onto this blatantly dishonest, racist, vapid, and incomprehensible mess of a movie as a way to put a salve on the open wound of losing a war. I cannot, as a person of sound mind and reasonable ability to separate my subjective feelings from objective reality, understand how such a scattered catastrophe like this would ever achieve such esteem. The Deer Hunter should be exhibit #1 in any creative class -- writing, film making, music, even sculpting, I don't care -- on the importance of the phrase "kill your darlings", because NOBODY told this to Michael Cimino. Every baffling, inexplicable choice he makes here is the result of a creator convinced of his own unimpeachable glory. I could watch a Neil Breen movie and see less unbridled ego. Why did this movie need to be three hours? Why? There is an art form in letting a scene breathe, so that the emotions have a chance to land and resonate with the audience. But at a certain point, resonance fades away like an echo in a cave. Cimino seems to think that the accidental brilliance Mike Nichols stumbled onto in the last scene of The Graduate was a template for ALL scenes, because Cimino just lets scenes go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, burying whatever point they could make in a shallow grave by being as tedious as possible. Why does the wedding reception need to be so exhaustively documented? Why does the Russian roulette scene in Vietnam need to go through six rounds? There is a tight, taut, punchy two hour movie that has been suffocated in the name of epic length and the delusion that letting the camera roll will somehow naturally begat a profound artistic statement. It does not. It never has. Cimino's delusions don't stop at the direction and screenwriting stages. The score, on the rare occasions where there is any to be heard, sounds like B-sides from one of those holiday-homecoming coffee commercials or a douche advert, and it is never placed properly. Sometimes, music will come up like some dramatic sting, except the music isn't dramatic, and the moment doesn't call for it. Even when it makes sense to have a score in the moment, though, it rarely if ever feels like the right music. I don't know how such a simple thing as lining up music and visuals was done so haphazardly, but somehow, Cimino got it wrong every time. I've touched on editing a bit with Cimino's tendency to let scenes spiral out of control, but when he does decide to end a scene or transition to something else, he does so in such a way as to render the viewer too confused to stay with the movie. The edit that takes the story from the small town to Vietnam is so jarring, it feels like there's a reel missing from the movie. And he follows that up by having the main trio reunite on the battlefield, only to slam-cut to the three of them in a POW camp, with no explanation of how they got captured. Is the cut out of Vietnam and back to the small hometown just as abrupt? You bet it is. The Deer Hunter shifts tones the way a 15-year-old shifts a manual transmission in their first driving lesson. As if all that weren't enough, the writing of The Deer Hunter does nothing with anything it sets up. The potential love triangle between Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken? It gets abandoned. The complications around Steve's marriage to a woman pregnant by another man (who is suggested but not confirmed to be John Cazale's character) and how his mother disapproves? Dropped. Steve having mental health issues from his injuries when he comes back? He just gets wheeled out of the hospital, no biggie. Why is Walken's character so broken, he disappears into the underground of Saigon? No explanation. De Niro seems to have been directed to portray mental illness as a tendency to stare off in the middle distance, until he snaps and decides to hold a gun to his buddy's head. John Savage seems to have been told to portray his PTSD as "be slightly giggly". The Deer Hunter is full of legendary actors, and every one of them is doing all they can to lift this lead balloon off the ground, but there just isn't enough in The Deer Hunter's script for anybody to work with. Oh, just one more thing: the rampant racism on display here, making the Vietnamese into bloodthirsty, amoral monsters (except the women, who are all whores). There is some serious revisionist mollifying going on in The Deer Hunter, especially in light of how it was well-known that Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam. William Calley's trial was eight years before this movie, but to watch The Deer Hunter is to experience the lie of American exceptionalism at its worst; the kind that willingly and with malice of forethought ignores indisputable fact. Not every GI was evil -- most weren't, most were kids sucked into a malestrom against their will -- but Michael Cimino's mind, every Vietnamese soldier was evil to the core. You can't polish the apple after it's rotted away, Mike. I knew this movie was polarizing coming in, but I was hoping I'd land on the good side. I was hoping for a gripping exploration of post-war guilt and trauma. Instead, The Deer Hunter turned out to be a weepy, maudlin, self-pitying apology tour by a deluded wannabe artiste who couldn't divorce himself from his own creation to see it said nothing and did less.