The Deer Hunter

#86 in my ranking of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

Here’s another one of those movies that everyone seems to love, and yet, I just don’t connect to it. I mean, I don’t connect to it at all. I find it primarily boring. Michael Cimino was probably one of the most self-indulgent, and unrightfully so, filmmaker of the 70s and 80s, and his disaster that was Heaven’s Gate feels earned. The one film that I thought of consistently through this was Ryan’s Daughter, the late entry in David Lean‘s career that is so absurdly overlong that it could have lost an hour of footage throughout, and it would have only improved the film. I feel the same way here, except that it might be more than an hour that needs cutting. However, much like Lean (though without the strong history of great films to back him up), Cimino has a strong eye and good way with actors, so the film is far from worthless.

Several friends who work at a steel mill in a small town in Pennsylvania are readying for a break in their friendship in more than one way. The first is that Steven (John Savage) is getting married. The other is that Steven, Michael (Robert de Niro), and Nick (Christopher Walken) are all getting ready to ship off to join the fight in Vietnam. The film wears its influence from The Godfather on its sleeve, and it’s not the casting of de Niro or John Cazale (who plays Stan). It’s the opening hour-long wedding and its preparation. The wedding at the beginning of The Godfather only lasts about forty minutes, by the way.

My problems with this film can really be held in microcosm with this first hour, and especially in comparison to what Francis Ford Coppola did in his film. The wedding in The Deer Hunter drags. It drags really badly. It accomplishes just this side of nothing, especially considering its absurd length, and it’s honestly not that entertaining on its own. What it’s supposed to be establishing is the town as a whole, but, from a story perspective, the only people who are really important are Steve, Mike, Nick, and Nick’s girl Linda (Meryl Streep), someone that Mike also has a secret thing for. The rest, especially the other members of the friend group of Stan and John (George Dzundza) are never anything more than side-characters and window dressing. They provide little more than some minor color on the back end of the film, so John carrying off one of the bridesmaids into the cloakroom in an extended shot accomplishes little. And the wedding is filled with this. What does get establishes (Mike and Nick’s friendship along with the halting pseudo-romance between Mike and Linda) doesn’t take that long, and the rest of the film is just wedding business. Compare that to The Godfather which opens with that forty minute sequence to introduce a couple of dozen characters that will become vitally important to the story later. Cimino takes more time to do less.

And then we skip ahead to Vietnam and the Russian roulette stuff, and it gives us an opportunity to talk about luck in fiction. Luck in fiction is a complete and total lie because it’s never actual luck, it’s the creation of the screenwriter. So is everything else, of course, but luck becomes artificial construction so obviously and so immediately, that there’s no actual tension to anything. We just sit back, wonder who the screenwriter wants to survive, and then watch as…those people survive. There was no luck to it. There was only the screenwriter (Deric Washburn and Cimino himself) saying that main characters don’t die by Russian roulette unless they say so.

I will say that the narrative dragging does mostly end in the first hour, though, seriously, the final two could have probably been cut down by a half-hour total and not really damaged much (Cimino called his editor, Peter Zinner, an idiot for trying to cut the film down from its three-hours, apparently). However, it ends up being driven more by coincidence and luck than earlier, and it robs much of the film’s little twists and turns of any dramatic impact.

So, Mike gets Steven and Nick away from their little captivity, but Nick gets out by helicopter and Mike has to carry Steven through the jungle. Well, we don’t see any of that, it just skips ahead to Nick feeling guilty and ridden by shellshock, coincidentally coming across an organizes Russian roulette game where Mike happens to be for no apparent reason, and at least Cimino had the decent sense to not give them a reunion then. I mean, this coincidental almost meeting, in a city of millions, ends up giving Mike the necessary information to find Nick later, so that’s honestly not that much better.

The heart of the film is supposed to be when Mike comes back home, finding himself distant from the place he had called home without anyone understanding his experiences. It’s pretty typical war movie stuff, and a subject that William Wyler did so much better in The Best Years of Our Lives, and Mike gets closer to Linda while people wonder whatever happened to Steven (whose wife knows and won’t tell anyone) and Nick.

The finale is, honestly, a joke. It’s the sort of thing you write in a satire of war films, not in an earnest one. Nick has been doing regular Russian roulette tournaments for months? Maybe even years? And he finally runs out of luck the one time Mike shows up? I’m sorry. This is complete nonsense. It ends up melodramatic tripe that feels all kinds of wrong and fake and, again, arbitrary because there was no actual luck involved in Nick’s pulling of the trigger, even those hundreds of times outside of our view, only the will of the screenwriter. I might have cut this movie a bit of slack if Mike had gone to Vietnam and found Nick’s grave, having lasted as long as he could and the getting hit by his own bullet months before.

So, the first third is just kind of boring, and everything after that ends up a mixture of kind of boring and really ridiculous. I seriously do not get how this movie has the goodwill towards it that it does. I will give it props for the earnestness of the performances, those never feel fake to be fair, and the visual compositions, especially when the boys go out into the mountains to hunt. Cimino and Vilmos Zsigmond, the cinematographer, make this film, purely from a visual aesthetic point of view, look beautiful from beginning to end. There are high points, but there aren’t many low points. It’s a gorgeous looking film.

And yet, I just keep coming back to the fact that it bored me so consistently. The wedding sequence has its charms, but it doesn’t work as a prologue because it accomplishes so little, especially considering its length, and it wouldn’t work as a stand-alone short because, again, there’s no real story to it. The Russian roulette stuff all feels fake and artificial, but there are serious efforts to make them tense, mostly through performance with Walken and Savage giving great, broken performances (de Niro is good, too, but Walken and Savage are honestly better).

So, I can’t bring myself to hate the movie, or even go so far as to say that I actively dislike it. For all of Cimino’s pretensions and self-indulgent meanderings, he and Zsigmond were a great team in making a good looking picture, and it’s filled with very good performances. I just…it feels like a bad comic book movie.

Rating: 2/4