The Deer Hunter

Several months back one of the premium movie packages had a free preview weekend, and when I saw that the channel was running The Deer Hunter, I recorded it since it's one of those movies I had actually never seen before. I finally got round to watching it this weekend.

In the decidedly blue-collar steel town of Clairton, PA, it's around 1970, and Steve (John Savage) is about to get married to his girlfriend Angela, with his wedding party consisting of Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), Stan (John Cazale) and a few others. Michael, Nick, and Steve are also going to be going off to fight in Vietnam, having just enlisted, so it's going to be one last blowout for everybody. First there's the wedding, and then everybody but Steve is going to be going off to the mountains to engage in a little deer hunting. While Steve is leaving behind a new wife to go to Vietnam, Nick has a girlfriend in Linda (Meryl Streep), and Michael, ever the aloof one, has nobody.

In Vietnam, the three buddies serve together reasonably well, until their caught by some Vietnamese soldiers in an ambush. They're held POW in a prison right on the river by some brutal captors who entertain themselves by capturing people and forcing them to play Russian roulette, with the captors betting on the outcome. It's enough to unnerve anybody, but it particularly unnerves poor Nick, especially when he's forced into the game. He technically loses, although the gun slips and only grazes him in the head. Eventually Michael figues a way out of it for them when he's able to surprise the captors by turning the guns on them, but it comes at the cost of Steve getting shot in the legs and the three being forced to escape downriver. Nick gets rescued by an American helicopter, and Michael and Steve have a long slog ahead of them, eventually getting rescued by the Americans.

Michael and Steve finally get demobbed and sent back to the states, Steve to a VA hospital since he's wheelchair-bound, and Michael back to his hometown that he no longer wants to face. As for Nick, he went AWOL in Saigon when he saw that the whole betting on Russian roulette thing was going on there too, not just in the prison camp. Michael tries to put his life back together, but the war changed him, while the buddies who stayed behind don't seem to have matured one iota. He decides he has to find Steve and when he does, he discovers exactly what's happened to Nick, too, which necessitates his going back to Vietnam -- against the backdrop of South Vietnam falling in 1975, no less! -- to try to rescue Nick.

There's a fair bit to like about The Deer Hunter, but there was also quite a bit that left me shaking my head in disbelief. The hunting scenes were the first thing, since those mountains looked nothing like anything you'd see east of the Rockies. In fact, they were in the Cascades in Washington state, but that's only a minor quibble. I was rolling my eyes much worse at the idea that Michael was going to be able to get back into the South Vietnam of 1975 with no issue, and actually be able to go against the tide of humanity trying to flee.. I also found it hard to believe Nick's character transformation.

The Deer Hunter is also an extremely slow movie. It's supposedly about Vietnam, although really, it's more a story of what any war does to people, with Vietnam only being used because it was the most recent war. Normally, I'm not a fan of Vietnam War movies, but this one was done close enough to the end of the war that it doesn't have as much of a feel of trying to re-live the 60s all over again, and as I said, it's only about Vietnam on the surface. But it takes over an hour to get to Vietnam, and the movie runs a little over three hours. There's no way you can excise the entire wedding and hunting party scenes that open up the movie, but I couldn't help but think the movie could have been cut down quite a bit.

On the plus side, the performances are generally quite good, and the location shooting was generally excellent (even the Washington state photography was lovely despite being nothing like Pennsylvania). Director Michael Cimino used several mill towns along the Ohio River as stand-ins for Clairton (a real place south of Pittsburgh). Obviously they couldn't use Vietnam, but Thailand is a suitable substitute.

Overall, I'd recommend The Deer Hunter, even though it's quite a slog.