Two men sit across from each other at a square table in what must be one of the seediest dive bars Vietnam has to offer. They have red headbands tied about their brows and they are clearly squaring off against one another in a brutal conflict. “Six chances!” the referee calls in Vietnamese, explaining the rules of the game to the contestants and the crowd of jeering onlookers. The first man takes his shot and the crowd waits anxiously to see the result – his opponent sweats and gulps nervously. After a moment of tension the man grins. “Toffee!” he says smugly. The crowd cheers and the bag of Revels is passed over to his hapless opponent. Now it is his turn to take a chance. Maybe he too can dodge a bullet.
Before I watched this month’s film, The Deer Hunter, the above Revels advert, which has been around since 2002, was always a bit of a mystery to me. Why on Earth would Mars Inc liken eating their product to playing a game of Russian Roulette, surely avoiding the suggestion that some of their sweets might kill their consumers was a better plan? Now that I’ve watched The Deer Hunter, I’m still confused. Though now it’s for entirely different reasons based more around the tastelessness of using the Vietnam War as a way to sell chocolate. But at least I now know the context behind the ad campaign, and I can see a little bit quite how deeply rooted and influential the imagery in the The Deer Hunter has been in popular culture. And I can kind of see why. Many of the shots are stunning and memorable – the grim industrial landscape of Clairton in the opening, the shot of Robert De Niro mirrored perfectly in the mountainside lake as he leaves for a hunt and yes, even the infamous Russian Roulette scenes between Christopher Walken and De Niro really stick in the mind. The acting is solid and even the sound design contributes to the overall narrative and setting of the movie. I can see why this film won five academy awards, including the 1979 award for Best Picture. This is not to say that it is a movie without faults or one that I think deserves a continued level of hype today.
Let’s start with the positives, because I am genuinely glad I have seen this movie (even if I don’t think I will ever need to see it again) and it did have some moments that I think were very effective. As I mentioned above, I think some of the shots in the movie were stunning and clearly managed to convey the tone of the scene. Neither the director, Michael Cimino, nor the director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond, were sleeping on the job; the grey, industrial township of Clairton contrasts neatly with the open and bright tranquility of the nearby mountains giving both locations a definite sense of identity and purpose. They were equally aware that the uncomfortable close-ups and awkward over the shoulder angles would only serve to heighten the tension when Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken’s Mike and Nick are being forced by their captors to gamble with their lives while they desperately wait for their chance to escape. It also almost goes without saying that the roulette scene would not have been half so effective or memorable without Walken and De Niro’s intense acting as they ping from wild eyed fury towards their captors, manic support of each other and to terror and resignation towards their situation. It is also this acting that gives weight to some of the… thinner elements of the movie.
The film’s score and sound design are also used to powerful effect. While The Deer Hunter is not afraid to use silence as a means to an end, it also uses sound and music to convey the feelings of the main characters. The beautiful (and professional) choral music heard as Mike and Nick hunt in the mountains of Pennsylvania immediately tell the viewer that this is a far more spiritual and sacred experience for them than the church wedding they have only recently attended. The music in the church had been sloppy and off key by comparison. I was watching with my sister, who is far more musically inclined than I am and she spent much of the wedding wincing and twitching every time the choir went for a high note.
Despite the strong acting, beautiful cinematography and sound design however, The Deer Hunter has its drawbacks and chief among them is its plot. Set between 1967 and 1975, The Deer Hunter tells the story of 3 steel workers from Pennsylvania (Michael – Robert De Niro, Nick – Christopher Walken and Steve – John Savage) who eagerly enlist to fight in Vietnam only to be captured and forced to play games of Russian Roulette for the amusement of their captors. A daring escape leaves Steve a double amputee, Micheal a traumatised war vet and Nick an amnesiac, drug addict stuck in Saigon playing even more Russian Roulette for money. It was at this point that the plot really fell apart for me. Despite the strength of both De Niro and Walken’s acting I couldn’t help feeling that, by the end of the movie, the whole situation was a little far-fetched and farcical. While I do believe that stress induced amnesia is a thing, and I have no doubt that Vietnam at that time was an entirely chaotic place, something in me found the image of Robert De Niro walking into a dive bar in a pressed linen suit too hard to swallow. It doesn’t help that one of the main criticisms levied against The Deer Hunter involves there being no records of Russian Roulette ever being used against captives of the Viet Cong, which makes one of the central metaphors of the movie (you only have one shot to get it right) feel like a contrived lie.
I also found The Deer Hunter difficult to swallow in other ways. While it is clearly and anti-war movie and does throw a harsh light on the devastating effect the Vietnam war had on the American soldiers, I felt it also had a massive gaping blind spot for the role the American military played in propagating the chaos in Vietnam and for the many atrocities committed in the name of Uncle Sam. This is hardly a new criticism of The Deer Hunter, but it is one that both my sister and I expressed before we manged to look at a contemporary review. This made for an uncomfortable viewing experience as the “evil” Viet Cong soldiers delight in torture, both physical and psychological, whereas things like Agent Orange don’t even get a look in. This discomfort was further added to in the final scene of the movie where Michael, Steve and all their friends back in Clairton sing a quiet rendition of ‘God Bless America’ at Nick’s wake. There is quite a lot of debate in whether or not this scene is meant to be ironic or not and I’m sad to say that as much as I want it to be, I just don’t see it. To me it feels like the characters were acknowledging that the war has cost them – their limbs, their mental stability, their dear friend – but that the war was elsewhere and America, where they are now, is still the land of the free and the good, and to me, that rang hollow.
So there you have it, my thoughts on 1978’s The Deer Hunter, written and directed by Michael Cimino. I would like to reiterate that I didn’t think it was a bad movie, but it did definitely have it’s issues, and it was in total honesty entirely too long for my tastes (three hours and four minutes, yowza!). If you’ve never seen it before, I would recommend giving it a go if only to give context to all the pop culture references to it, because now that I’m looking I’m seeing them everywhere.
Please let me know if you have any differing opinions, I’d love to here them and please stay tuned for next month’s film review – ‘A Letter to Momo’ a 2011 anime movie about dealing with grief and the loss of a parent… fun!
Review Thirty-Six 