The Talkies/The Deer Hunter
Yagoda, Ben
THE TALKIES by Ben Yagoda The Deer Hunter Although almost half of The Deer Hunter takes place in Vietnam, it is not "about" the war, and that seems a blessing. When Coming Home and Who'll Stop...
...By not letting his characters respond to these (perceived) realities, Cimino abdicates his responsibility toward them and sets the film out of whack...
...hospital...
...This scene begins eloquently- with the fumbling over dishes and coffee cups that covers grief-but ends with a fizzle...
...A he second half, however, not only falls off as narrative, but exposes the weakness or confusion in director Michael Cimino and screenwriter Deric Washburn's larger conception...
...As it is, judgments ineluctably creep in: Conditions are dreadful...
...When Coming Home and Who'll Stop the Rain, last year's prominent Vietnam films, tried to shift from personal to political drama, they succeeded only in achieving banality...
...In the opening scenes he was outspoken...
...North and South Vietnamese are blood-thirsty savages...
...Maybe Cimino is depicting the characters' refusal or inability to face that horror...
...but the meaning of his action is never raised from obscurity...
...Contrast Altman's vestigial Wedding...
...Even with the war at its height, the trio has no second thoughts about going off, and is supported unanimously by the town-without a trace of irony...
...The Deer Hunter doggedly avoids messages, with the war serving mainly as a setting...
...jukebox sing-alongs at Welsh's bar, where Michael, Ben Yagoda is a free-lance writer living in New York...
...When Michael learns that Nick is still alive, he returns to Vietnam determined to bring him back...
...Cimino alternates between idealization of Clairton's citizens and condescension toward them...
...After Nick's interment at a cemetery in view (of course) of the mill, the survivors repair (of course) to Welsh's, for brunch and (of course) singing-"God Bless America...
...a choral rendition of "Geron-imo" by the gang on their way to a final hunting trip...
...Despite the oppressive ugliness of the mill (it is literally the backyard of the likewise ugly mobile home shared by Michael and Nick), Clairton is a real community, with beliefs and rituals that still work...
...You just can't send a man to the Heart of Darkness and bring him back with a No Comment...
...But in that case he has betrayed them by denying them any access to the doubt-about the war and about humanity-that has been raised in us...
...The shots of Vietnamese swarming over the U.S, Embassy gate, and of the abandoned city as Michael makes his search, are haunting...
...Indeed, The Deer Hunter's inconsistent perspective on its characters is what most seriously undermines its effect...
...It is the wedding night of Steven (John Savage...
...The communal anthem could be seen as a tragic coming to terms with death, and with the war, yet the characters have not earned that kind of reconciliation-heretofore they have shown no comprehension of the war's horror...
...Male friendship, already strong, is cemented by song: chants at the wedding...
...He arrives during the evacuation of Saigon, and here the film regains some of its earlier power...
...It has a familiar Hemingway ring, with prohibitions against using more than one shot to kill a deer, showing excessive emotion, betraying a trust, etc...
...Nick, Steven, and their friends go after work and after every important event in their lives...
...The film's final movement is in Clairton...
...Through Michael's nerve and refusal to capitulate, they manage to escape...
...Nick, in describing his feelings about hunting, can manage only, "I love the trees, the way the trees...I love the trees...
...Ultimately, Cimino's decision to make a non-political film may not have been so wise after all: The war plays too big a part in The Deer Hunter for it to be simply there...
...Steven loses his leg and his sanity, while Nick goes AWOL in search of some Southeast Asian Heart of Darkness...
...But only he emerges intact...
...Once in Vietnam, the three almost immediately find themselves prisoners under horrific conditions: They are forced to play Russian roulette, while their captors bet on the results...
...now, though we wonder about the effects Vietnam has had on him, he says nothing, merely skulking around town and looking dashing in his beret and turned-up trench-coat...
...The closest we come to an insight into Michael's thinking is on a reunion hunt, when he stalks a buck but purposely shoots awry...
...But Michael's intensity is excessive: One buddy, with rare perspicacity, calls him a "control freak...
...the evacuation of Saigon was a dishonorable fiasco...
...in a few days he and his buddies Nick (Christopher Walken) and Michael (Robert De Niro) will leave for Vietnam...
...The Deer Hunter opens in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a steel town whose mill is visually, aurally, and spiritually omnipresent...
...The film loses its grip on Michael when he returns to Clairton alone (Steven is already in a V.A...
...It is at the hunt that the one eccentricity in this harmonic setting emerges: Michael's obsessive personal code...
...He finds his friend, but it is too late: Nick has gone over the edge and will come home only in a coffin...
...Thus, much of the dialogue is in the honorable American tradition of inarticulateness...
...This is the first half of The Deer Hunter, and it is the most impressive display of cinematic narrative I have seen in some time...
...These people often find it hard to think, too, Nick doesn't know why he's asked Linda to marry him, Michael doesn't know what he thinks about the messy love affair he has with her later on, and no one questions the quality of their mill-made lives...
...It is small wonder that so much hoopla (including the New York Film Critics' award for Best Picture) preceded the film's general release: In a climate of pap it attempts, and achieves, the panoramic...
Vol. 12 • March 1979 • No. 3
