The Deer Hunter (1978), Dir. Michael Cimino
Starring: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep
Undertaking the three-hour journey that is The Deer Hunter should seem like less of an endeavour than it did, especially with a cast featuring some of Hollywood's finest actors. Following the lives of young steel-workers from a small town to Vietnam and back, it was a dazzlingly successful Oscar picture, combining the blue-collar realism of 70's filmmaking with the sort of weepy mock-epic drama that has always struck gold with the Academy. Unfortunately, even De Niro feels stunted here - a shallowly enigmatic character whose continual allusions to deer hunting attempt to deepen the central meaning of the film. Sadly, the metaphor fails to make sense after 176 minutes of running time. Its' texture of realism falls short because of its overreaching and downright silly plot points, and its repetitious featuring of Russian Roulette is a similarly empty metaphor which goes nowhere. Many films succeed on a simple but effective 'horrors of war' premise, but The Deer Hunter is not one of them; it victimises the Americans and portrays the Vietcong as unrealistically sadistic. Not to be too hasty about the film's unrealistic moments; it does contain scenes that offer much potential. The wedding scene at the opening of the film has all the laughs and dynamic naturalism of a family home video. It succeeds at capturing the joy, drunkenness, and petty arguments of an extended family, but by the conclusion, when a deeply ironic patriotic song comes into play, it fails to convince. Pseudo-intellectual is a phrase which readily comes to mind in regard to The Deer Hunter, and it is fallible along the lines of its unjustified pretentiousness, but most of all in its inability to cohesively pull together a convincing story.