Michael Cimino 1978)
This was the third time I’d seen The Deer Hunter and my second viewing of it at BFI within the last few years. I found it more than ever emotionally affecting although I may have been responding to the actors, and what they mean to me, at least as much as to the themes and the story. You’re soon aware of the discrepancy between Michael Cimino’s masterly description of social life and ritual in Clairton, Pennsylvania and the overemphatic suggestions of what’s under the surface of the main characters’ lives and what may be in store for them in the course of the film. Clairton is a real place and, in the period in which The Deer Hunter is set, many of its citizens worked in the local steel mill – as do Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage), the three Russian-American principals of the movie, who are about to start their military service in Vietnam. Once the men finish work at the steel mill, the first hour or so of the film focuses on Steven’s Russian Orthodox wedding to his pregnant girlfriend Angela (Rutanya Alda), who’s carrying another man’s child. The morning after the wedding reception, which doubles as a send-off party for the soldiers-to-be, Michael, Nick and two other friends, Stan (John Cazale) and Axel (Chuck Aspegren), indulge in their favourite pastime – deer hunting in the mountains above the town.
As dramatised social observation (photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond), the preparations for the wedding, the marriage service and the reception are impressively staged and fascinatingly detailed. The dramatic structure of the reception is indebted to the wedding at the start of The Godfather; the secret looks exchanged by the characters, what’s happening at the margins of the dancing and drinking – these correspond to the conversations in the shaded room within Don Vito’s house. The deer hunt and the following sequence in the bar owned by John Welsh (George Dzundza), the friends’ favourite drinking place, are no less absorbing. But the dropping of lead weights, whenever Michael Cimino needs to explain a situation or take things forward, intrudes occasionally from an early stage. You hear it in the speech from Steven’s mother (Shirley Stoler) to the priest before the wedding ceremony, and in pale-faced Nick’s cryptic anticipation of Vietnam as he and Michael chat, in the lodgings that they share. You see it in the drops of red wine spilling on the bride’s dress as she and her husband drink from conjoined goblets – the camera captures too deliberately this omen of ill fortune. A spectre at the wedding feast takes the form of an ominous, embittered Green Beret, who wanders in to the reception. When Michael explains that he, Nick and Steven are about to go to Vietnam, this man raises his glass and toasts them with the words ‘Fuck it’.
The interactions of the main characters, throughout what is in effect act one of The Deer Hunter, are compelling – even though Deric Washburn’s script may not have clarified for the actors, let alone the audience, quite what they feel for each other. There’s also an extraordinary episode between the reception and the next morning’s deer hunt. Michael, verging on drunk, runs through the streets of the town, stripping naked on his way. This is followed by a scene in which he and Nick talk quietly and with a real sense of intimacy. Their conversation immediately registers as prospectively significant – Nick wants an assurance that, whatever happens in Vietnam, Michael won’t leave him there – yet it seems, while it lasts, to be trying to get to the heart of the men’s relationship. At one point, Stan accuses Michael of being a ‘faggot’. Stan has to be joking – Michael laughs it off anyway. The men’s lives are strongly homosocial but the idea of homosexual feelings is ludicrous – perhaps not only to them but also to Michael Cimino, or the maker of any big-budget production about war and heroism in the late 1970s. The homoerotic undercurrent is strong, though, especially watching the film at this distance in time. A repressed homosexual reading helps make some sense of the relationships of Michael, Nick and Nick’s girlfriend, Linda (Meryl Streep). When Michael’s had a few drinks at the wedding reception, does he make a tentative move on Linda because he’s attracted to her or because she somehow brings him closer to Nick?
It’s in the middle section, set in Vietnam, that the disjuncture between the quality of the film-making and the thinking behind the camera is realised most clearly. On its release, The Deer Hunter was politically controversial because of its ‘yellow peril’ characterisation of the Vietcong and, in particular, the Russian roulette that Michael, Nick and Steven’s captors force them to play. There seems to be consensus that there’s no evidence of the Vietcong really subjecting American prisoners to this. The first Russian roulette sequence is brilliantly edited (by Peter Zinner) and played, however, and is so viscerally compelling that, as you watch, it’s unarguable. It’s a piece of dramatic licence that the three friends, who went to Vietnam together, are still together in the thick of warfare when this second part of the film begins but, after surviving the Russian roulette (and killing their captors), Michael and Steven, who is traumatised and severely injured, are separated from Nick. He, after recuperating in a military hospital in Saigon, is drawn into the city’s gambling dens, where Russian roulette is played for big bucks.
In the third part of the film, Michael comes home to Pennsylvania (as does the now wheelchair-bound Steven). Michael spends time with Linda, including a couple of nights in the same bed, but his sexual appetite is negligible. Not knowing what has happened to Nick, he can’t settle in Clairton and, when he learns that someone in Saigon has been mailing large amounts of money to Steven and believes it’s Nick, Michael returns to the city, just before its fall in 1975. He finds Nick in one of the dens and, although the latter doesn’t at first appear to recognise Michael, he does so shortly before putting a bullet through his own head. Good as his word, Michael doesn’t leave his friend in Vietnam. He brings Nick’s body home and the film ends with Michael, Linda and others in John Welsh’s bar after Nick’s funeral. They sing ‘God Bless America’. In long retrospect, it’s hard to say whether The Deer Hunter is consciously God-and-country and xenophobic in the way its critics characterised it, in late 1978 and early 1979. (The controversy was sharpened because Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, The Deer Hunter’s main rival at the forthcoming Oscars, was promoted as, from a political point of view, its polar opposite.)
Cimino and one of the film’s producers, Michael Deeley, denied accusations that the film was right wing. It may well be true that Cimino didn’t mean it be political at all – although, given the subject, that in itself would raise questions about the kind of intelligence behind the camera. Julien (Pierre Segui), who lures Nick onto the Russian roulette circuit in Saigon, is French, which could be construed symbolically (the baton of ill-fated occupation of the country passing from colonialist France to the US). Even if that wasn’t the intention, the film presents the deadly game as thoroughly alien. It’s more than a metaphor for America’s heart-of-darkness experience in the war: Cimino presents it virtually as the Vietnamese national sport. That’s offensive yet it’s possible the Russian roulette sequences came to dominate simply because they appealed to Cimino as a particular film-making challenge. He certainly met the challenge. These sequences make for exceptional screen drama.
The plotting begins to wobble at the end of the second section of the story – from the point at which Michael, before his first return to America, spots Nick in Saigon but fails to make contact with him. When Michael is back in Clairton, the early sequences there are marvellous, thanks to the way they’re played – Robert De Niro is especially magnificent in this part of the film – but Michael’s pivotal visit to Steven in a veterans’ hospital seems artificially delayed. The patterning of the deer hunts is a bit obvious too (although gripping to watch): Michael kills a deer before he goes to war but can’t bring himself to do so once he’s returned from Vietnam. Pauline Kael wasn’t wrong when she described The Deer Hunter as ‘a small minded film with greatness in it’.
The great things include the ensemble acting, which stands comparison with that in the first two Godfather pictures: the main actors’ dynamic verisimilitude is out of this world. Christopher Walken’s physical presence adds to the sexually ambiguous import of the story – there’s a feminine quality in his face and his slenderness is somewhat androgynous. Walken makes dazzling transitions between vividness (for example, when Nick dances at the wedding party) and blankness. I was moved watching Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep for a combination of reasons: not only because De Niro gives a fine, complex performance as Michael but also because he was just about always this good at this stage of his career; not only because it’s amazing what Streep makes of the underwritten character of Linda but also because it’s thrilling to realise again it was just the beginning for her. (This was her second cinema film, following her small part in Julia.) Streep was in the cast largely so that she could be with her then partner, John Cazale, who died before The Deer Hunter was released. Watching him is moving in a different way. Cazale is painfully thin but I loved the moment when the lank-haired, weedy Stan looks at his reflection for a few seconds and decides ‘Beautiful …’ Which also describes John Cazale’s acting.
9 August 2014
