Although a huge success at the time of its release in 1978, I think it's fair to say that Michael Cimino's film has fallen into a certain amount of neglect in the intervening decades. The first of the really big-canvas cinematic works taking as their starting-point the USA's disastrous involvement in Vietnam, it has suffered by comparison with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which followed it onto the screen a few months later, and whose epic, philosophical pretensions were manifest in a way The Deer Hunter's underlying motivations weren't. This is unfair, since they are two completely different movies which just happen to have come along within the same year, both feeling tentatively for a handhold on what most would probably still agree was a national trauma that had shaken everyone in America at the time.
Whereas Coppola's great film largely dispensed with character and backstory in favour of an immersive, multisensory, mythological descent into Hell and madness, with Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness as a template, Cimino's is far more traditionally novelistic in its approach. The kernel of its narrative was, apparently, a short story about the psychology of gamblers betting on 'games' of Russian Roulette in Las Vegas, and had nothing to do with Vietnam. Cimino and his co-writers took the original text and expanded it into a three-hour saga of three working men from the Pennsylvania steelbelt, who are drafted to fight in Vietnam, taken prisoner, and forced by their captors to play Russian Roulette as a form of torture. They escape just before the end of the War, but the consequences of their experience change everything for them forever.
Although it won multiple Oscars, The Deer Hunter ran into criticism on several fronts straight away. It was accused of racism for its portrayal of Vietnamese people. The Russian Roulette motif was condemned as inaccurate and ahistorical. And it is a very, very long film - though the cut that finally made the cinemas was half an hour shorter than Cimino's preferred version. The cinematography and sound are generally, and rightly, reckoned to be superb, and the delineation of the principal characters - played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage - as well as the supporting cast, including a very sick John Cazale (it was to be his last film) and a very young Meryl Streep, is lovingly done. The background of a very traditional, insular, working-class Russian-American community, is vividly rendered: a flamboyant wedding scene early in the film lasts nearly an hour, but remains compelling throughout.
Watching the film again, for the first time in maybe thirty years, I understood the reservations that some contemporary commentators expressed, but wonder if these didn't arise from misplaced expectations of a piece of work premissed on US involvement in the divisive, bloody and chaotic war which had only come to an end three years previously. And I think a large part of that is Cimino's own fault, because there is a huge narrative gap in The Deer Hunter - and that is the Vietnam War itself.
Let me explain. As I've said above, the placing of Mike (De Niro), Nick (Walken) and Steve (Savage) firmly in the context of their community, which takes up the first third of the film, is crucial and well-realised. We see them manifesting all the swagger, bravado, bullshit, egotism, insecurity, brotherliness, banter and solidarity of groups of young male friends everywhere. We see them firmly anchored in their workplace, their favourite bar, their weekend dedication to deer-hunting, their second-generation immigrant community, and their automatic patriotism - which we, as privileged viewers who know this is a film 'about Vietnam' also know is going to come back to bite them. They are ordinary Joes, insignificant and sympathetic in equal measure, whose characters are undoubtedly going to be tested by their experience of war.
Except that they aren't. Not that we see, anyway. The film cuts from a post-hunt booze-up in Pennsylvania straight to the boys' captivity at the hands of the Viet Cong, with only a vanishingly brief combat scene to suggest they've spent any time at all under fire. We see nothing of how they have responded to the alien environment into which they've been dropped, surrounded by enemies, expected to kill without question or be killed without warning. Having spent an hour establishing what they were like as ordinary blokes in their ordinary home, Cimino fails to develop their characters any further - although in that minuscule combat scene we do see Mike able to use a flamethrower on other human beings, something for which a Pennsylvania steelworks is unlikely to have prepared him.
All this is important. For a film that has premissed itself on a novelistic portrayal of character and relationships, these are allowed to go by the board for what I would argue is the crucial period of its characters' lives. Consequently, we jump straight from mateship in a midwest bar to trauma and Russian Roulette in a Vietcong prison, with no intervening narrative. It's important also to remember that the film's point of view is largely that of De Niro's Mike, so we need to know where he's coming from and how he got there. It might be understandable that the experience of being thrown into a terrifying environment utterly different from that of his own background has made all Vietnamese look to him like incomprehensible, cruel enemies, but nothing in the film actually shows that. Instead, all the Vietnamese we see simply look like incomprehensible, cruel enemies.
I don't know that contemporary historians' attestation that Russian Roulette wasn't actually part of Viet Cong torture techniques necessarily matters in the context of the film as a work of art. Apparently, some US Vietnam War veterans have said that as a metaphor for the imminence and unpredictability of sudden death there it is a good one. Certainly, as a dramatic device, particularly towards the end of the film, the desperation of men prepared to stake their lives on odds of 6/1, and the unfathomable cynicism of gamblers prepared to stake and make money on the same, is a terrifying symbol of human perversity and evil.
In sum, then, it's arguable that The Deer Hunter is no more a film specifically about the Vietnam War than Apocalypse Now is. But as a film about humanity, community, and the capacity of human beings to destroy both, and themselves, for ignoble reasons, it is a flawed masterpiece.
