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Michael Cimino'southward "The Deer Hunter" is a three-hr movie in 3 major movements. Information technology is a progression from a hymeneals to a funeral. It is the story of a group of friends. It is the record of how the war in Vietnam entered several lives and altered them terribly forever. It is non an anti-state of war film. It is not a pro-war film. Information technology is one of the well-nigh emotionally shattering films e'er made. It begins with men at work, in the furnace of the steel mills in a town somewhere in Pennsylvania. The klaxon sounds, the shift is over, the men get downward the road to a saloon for a beer. They sing "I Dear You Bay-bee" forth with the jukebox. It is still morning on the final solar day of their lives that will belong to them before Vietnam.
The motion picture takes its fourth dimension with these opening scenes, with the steel factory and the saloon and especially with the nuptials and the party in the American Legion Hall. It's important not simply that we come to know the characters, but that we experience absorbed into their lives; that the wedding rituals and rhythms experience like more than than just ethnic details. They do.
The opening movement is lingered over; information technology'due south similar the wedding ceremony celebration in "The Godfather," but celebrated by hard-working people who accept come up to consume, dance and drink a lot and wish luck to the newlyweds and to say practiced-by to the three immature men who have enlisted in the Army. The party goes on long plenty for everyone to get drunkard who is e'er going to, and and so the newlyweds drive off and the rest of the friends go upward into the mountains to shoot some deer. At that place is some Hemingwayesque talk well-nigh what it means to shoot deer: We are still at a bespeak where shooting something is supposed to mean something.
And then Vietnam occupies the screen, suddenly, with a wall of noise, and the second movement of the film is almost the experiences that three of the friends (Robert De Niro, John Brutal and Christopher Walken) have at that place. At the film's center comes i of the most horrifying sequences ever created in fiction, as the three are taken prisoner and forced to play Russian roulette while their captors gamble on who will, or will non, accident out his brains.
The game of Russian roulette becomes the organizing symbol of the movie: Anything you can believe about the game, about its deliberately random violence, near how it touches the sanity of men forced to play information technology, will apply to the war as a whole. It is a brilliant symbol because, in the context of this story, it makes any ideological statement about the war superfluous.
The De Niro character is the one who somehow finds the strength to keep going and to keep Cruel and Walken going. He survives the prison campsite and helps the others. And so, finally home from Vietnam, he is surrounded by a silence nosotros can never quite penetrate. He is touched vaguely by desire for the girl that more than one of them left backside, just does not act decisively. He is a "hero," greeted shyly, awkwardly by the hometown people.
He delays for a long time going to the VA hospital to visit Savage, who has lost his legs. While he is there he learns that Walken is notwithstanding in Vietnam. He had promised Walken -- on a drunken moonlit night nether a basketball hoop on a playlot, the night of the wedding -- that he would never leave him in Vietnam. They were both thinking, romantically and naively, of the deaths of heroes, only now De Niro goes back in an altogether different context to retrieve the living Walken. The hope was adolescent stuff, merely at that place is no adolescence left when De Niro finds Walken still in Saigon, playing Russian roulette professionally.
At nigh this point in a review it is customary to praise or criticize those parts of a film that seem deserving: the actors, the photography, the managing director'due south handling of the cloth. It should be said, I suppose, that "The Deer Hunter" is far from flawless, that there are moments when its characters do non behave convincingly, implausible details involving Walken'south stay and fate in Vietnam, unnecessary ambiguities in the De Niro grapheme. It can likewise exist said that the film contains greatly moving performances, and that it is the most impressive blending of "box function" and "art" in American movies since "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Godfather" and "Nashville." All of those kinds of observations will become irrelevant as you lot feel the motion picture. It gathers you lot upwardly, it takes you lot along, information technology doesn't allow up.
"The Deer Hunter" is said to be about many subjects: About male bonding, about mindless patriotism, about the dehumanizing effects of war, near Nixon'due south "silent majority." It is nearly any of those things that you lot cull, if yous choose, simply more than annihilation else, it is a heartbreakingly effective fictional automobile that evokes the agony of the Vietnam fourth dimension.
If it is not overtly "anti-state of war," why should it be? Hell, nosotros're all confronting the war . . . at present. What "The Deer Hunter" insists is that we non forget the state of war. Information technology ends on a curious note: The singing of 'God Bless America.' I won't tell you how it arrives at that detail moment (the unfolding of the final passages should occur to you as events in life) but I do desire to observe that the lyrics of "God Anoint America" have never before seemed to me to contain such an infinity of possible meanings, some tragic, some unspeakably lamentable, some few all the same defiantly hopeful.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the movie critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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The Deer Hunter (1979)
182 minutes
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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-deer-hunter-1979
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