Michael Cimino’s magisterial, but flawed, Vietnam War epic was released into theatres only three years after Operation Frequent Wind, the chaotic Saigon airlift that sealed the United States’ fate and brought the conflict, for the West, to a humiliating close.
Starring Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage, with impressive support from Meryl Streep and John Cazale – who was dying of lung cancer during filming – The Deer Hunter told the tale of three Slavic-American steelworkers from redstate western Pennsylvania who headed to South-East Asia to fight the Communists, where they experienced unimaginable barbarity.
It is a symphony in three movements. The first draws out the blue-collar lives of the men, their friends, families, and lovers. They work, drink, shoot pool and hunt deer in the mountains. The camaraderie is lingered over, a Russian Orthodox wedding lovingly rendered, the sense of community, of hardship embraced, absolute.
The switch to Vietnam is an operatic shift of scale. Filmed in Thailand, Cimino captured the heat and sweat of the jungle, the drone of the choppers, the fear of the soldiers. Captured by the Viet Cong, De Niro, Walken, and Savage (Mike, Nick, and Steven) are held in half-submerged bamboo cages and – in one of the most memorable set pieces in the history of cinema – forced to play Russian Roulette by their guards, who bet on the outcome.
They escape, not without loss. However, they cannot escape the memory, which each tries – and fails – to deal with in a different way. If the finale in Saigon is brutal, it is at one with what has gone before. Clairton, Pennsylvania, an unremarkable town south of Pittsburgh, is destroyed as comprehensively as any Vietnamese village caught up in the fighting.
But while audiences were horrified and delighted, critics were divided. Many were disappointed by alleged factual inaccuracy, the one-dimensional characterisation of the VC as cruel and inscrutable, the lack of moral intelligence in the binary portrayal of “goodies” and “baddies” – a pervasive sense of American victimhood.
Yet no one could argue against the central metaphor of Russian Roulette as a stunning analogue for the dehumanising, arbitrary nature of war. These scenes capture the cruelty and futility, the insanity endemic in the behaviour of the guards, and its psychological legacy. It is a metaphor that renders arguments about ideology,
whether the film is pro- or anti-war, obsolete.
If, in the mountains of Pennsylvania, the “one shot kill” of the deer is seen as manly and the animal’s death as ennobling, they are not categorisations that can survive exposure to the horror of South-East Asia.
At a moment when America was licking its wounds, The Deer Hunter offered an unwelcome alloy of disillusion and patriotic melancholy, captured by the ambiguous singing of God Bless America in the Clairton bar after the closing funeral. At no stage does any participant criticise their country’s right to be in Vietnam.
Hollywood lapped it up, dispensing Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Sound and Best Editing, amongst myriad nominations. How it failed to win Best Cinematography for Vilmos Zsigmond remains a mystery to this day.
The Deer Hunter is a big, overlong, emotionally draining, state of the nation movie that picks its battles and loses some of them. Yet it is impossible to fault the scale or ambition. If some consider it a sprawling, chaotic failure, suffering delusions of grandeur and unable to deliver on its vision or promise, that is no more or less than its subject, the United States’ engagement in Vietnam.
