The Deer Hunter (1978)

The Deer Hunter, winner of Best Picture of 1978, is the first Vietnam War movie that I remember seeing as a kid. That would have been thirty years ago at this point, when I was 15 years old, so watching it again this time was a bit of a revelation. This isn't a film that's primarily about what happened in Vietnam although I suspect that's what many people remember about it. This is really more of an investigation of the impact serving in Vietnam had on the soldiers who returned home. I'd forgotten that, and I suspect many others have as well if they haven't seen the film recently.

Only about a third of the film takes place during the war itself, and those scenes are primarily about the games of Russian roulette that three American soldiers have to participate in, thanks to their capture and imprisonment. Those scenes and some later ones involving the same brutal game being played for "fun" or profit were, of course, the ones that I remembered from my first viewing of the film years ago. They are just too shocking, in some ways, to be forgotten. Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage are the three friends who have wound up as POWs. They try to stay together as much as possible during the war but are inevitably separated and go in very different directions with their lives.

DeNiro's Michael returns home to the small Pennsylvania steel town where the three friends lived before, but he has difficulty adjusting to life after his military service. He begins to renew a relationship with Meryl Streep's Linda, a woman who had been dating his friend Nick but who has always had feelings for Michael as well. Savage's Steven has been injured in the war and is now confined to a wheelchair; he prefers to remain institutionalized rather than try to return home and create a life with his wife and child. Nick's story is the most heartbreaking of all; he has been severely emotionally traumatized by the war and seems to find an escape through his continued involvement in Vietnam's underground Russian roulette tournaments. Nick is played by Christopher Walken, who is very good here, a far cry from the parody of himself that Walken has been playing in recent years.

There are four parts to this film, and each is distinct in its tone and imagery. The first is set on the weekend that Steven gets married before going off to war. The other friends go on their last deer hunting trip before Michael and Nick join Steven. It's a bit more than an hour long, and much of that time is spent getting to know the individual characters in some detail. The second part is primarily focused on the three men in the prisoner-of-war camp and their subsequent escape. We are given only about 40 minutes or so of combat and capture, though, as if to suggest that the war itself is not the primary focus. Third comes the return to the United States for Michael and Steven. Michael, in particular, has become a very different man than the one who left for Vietnam early in the film, and The Deer Hunter gives us another hunting trip to show the contrast as sharply as possible. The final main portion of the film deals with Michael's return to Vietnam to retrieve Nick. Clocking in at a bit more than three hours, The Deer Hunter manages to take its time very carefully in depicting even of these major portions of the plot. Each is thoughtfully presented, and each contributes to the overall impact that the film has.

All of the members of the cast are excellent, and the direction by Michael Cimino is first-rate, worthy of his award as Best Director that year. Hollywood seemed to turn its attention finally in the late 1970s when it came to the Vietnam War. This was the same year as Coming Home, which was nominated for Best Picture against The Deer Hunter, and the following year saw Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's epic reimagining of The Heart of Darkness as a Vietnam era parable. The Deer Hunter was, I think, one of the best films about the ways in which our country dealt with this time period, and it retains for me even more power today than it did when I watched it as a teenager all those many long years ago.