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Rated: R
Starring: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, et al.
Director: Michael Cimino Review
Winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director,
The Deer Hunter is simultaneously an audacious directorial conceit and one
of the greatest films ever made about friendship and the personal impact
of war. Like Apocalypse Now, it's hardly a conventional battle film--the
soldier's experience was handled with greater authenticity in Platoon--but
its depiction of war on an intimate scale packs a devastatingly dramatic
punch. Director Michael Cimino may be manipulating our emotions with
masterful skill, but he does it in a way that stirs the soul and pinches
our collective nerves with graphic, high-intensity scenes of men under
life-threatening duress. Although Russian-roulette gambling games were not
a common occurrence during the Vietnam war, they're used here as a
metaphor for the futility of the war itself. To the viewer, they become
unforgettably intense rites of passage for the best friends--Pennsylvania
steelworkers played by Robert De Niro, John Savage, and Oscar winner
Christopher Walken--who may survive or perish during their tour through a
tropical landscape of hell. Back home, their loved ones must cope with the
war's domestic impact, and in doing so they allow The Deer Hunter to
achieve a rare combination of epic storytelling and intimate,
heart-rending drama. --Jeff Shannon
----------- If you really want to get the
most out of viewing this picture, don't make the mistake many of these
Amazon reviewers do, by either assuming the politics of Cimino et al or
using your own pro- or anti-America agenda as a critical yardstick.
Because really this film isn't proselytizing a particular viewpoint,
unlike Cimino's disastrous follow-up HEAVEN'S GATE. And don't think of it
solely as a war movie. Actually, it's a lot like GONE WITH THE WIND: an
epic-scale look at life and society in a specific place and time in the
past (in this case, 1968, ten years before the film was made), and how
folks send off their high-spirited young men to a war that no one pays a
great deal of mind to - and how that war shatters not only the young men
but the world they left behind, forever. The wedding scene IS long and in
lesser hands on either side of the camera would be a dead weight but
Cimino and lensman (sorry) Vilmos Zsigmond frame it in reverent widescreen
grandeur, and a once-in-a-lifetime cast nails every character nuance and
conversational tic, so that the scene flows on and on, vibrant with life
and perfectly evoking not only a rust-belt town but the fast-fading
rust-belt values of the nation. Besides, with a cast like this movie's,
working at the height of their powers with inspired material, you really
don't want scenes to end. When the movie segues to Vietnam, the tone
shifts to horror and finally surrealism. Many consider this portion of the
movie horribly racist, but that's a safe, kneejerk-liberal reaction. These
aren't Harvard freshmen, they're barely-educated steeltown kids being sent
to a faroff jungle to kill VC, who get captured & tortured by the men they
are trying to kill. For enlightened liberal pieties to inform the dialogue
or the tone of these scenes would be criminally false. That's probably
what makes this a great flick, however, that right-wingers can despise it
for its obvious liberalism and the bleeding hearts can hate it for its
reactionary jingoism. Ain't consensus wonderful? Check your own politics
at the door before watching this (widescreen version only!) and savor four
transcendent performances by DeNiro, Savage, Walken & Streep, plus the
late John Cazale doing his patented sweaty-weasel turn as an added bonus.
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