The Deer Hunter

So many criticize the first hour-long act of this movie (be prepared for a 3 hour-plus long epic) as being slow, boring, self-indulgent, akin to reading a maddeningly long mandatory Victorian classic (Middlemarch maybe?) forced upon them by a well-intentioned though oftentimes unenthusiastic high

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school teacher or university professor. Which is a shame, because those who take the time to mine the riches of a Middlemarch or Copperfield are inevitably rewarded, and the same can be said for those willing to carve out time for The Deer Hunter. Do we call the first third of Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" boring or slow because he's introducing us to all the characters while the main exciting action in the novel appears in the latter two-thirds? And at least the first third of The Deer Hunter has some crass humor -- you can't criticize it for that, or lack thereof. My Beavis-And-Buttheadish ten-year-old ears still fondly recalls Christopher Walken's earthy steel worker character (Nick), just off his sparks-flying-everywhere, sweltering shift, standing beside fellow pal Michael (played by DeNiro), in the locker/dressing room of the Clairton, PA steel mill, asking his cohorts, "Did you hear about the happy Roman?....He was Gladiator."

True, I should not have been allowed to watch this movie barely turned ten when ON TV (early cable channel in LA) began airing it shortly after the controversial 1979 Academy Awards (hundreds of protesters rallied outside the Oscar venue over what they perceived as racism over how the Viet Cong and, in essence, the Vietnamese culture was allegedly negatively portrayed) but my parents rationale for allowing me to view this, who knows?, God love 'em nonetheless, every parent, more often than not, makes an R-rated movie-mistake with their child.

I've since watched The Deer Hunter literally a dozen times over the ensuing decades, and it remains to me as undated, relevant (especially in light of the horror of Iraq) and classic as ever. Force yourself through the first hour of character study, the snippets of harsh steel mill environs, alcoholism, family dysfunction, hunting deer drunk, culminating in a gaudy though gorgeous Greek (or was it a Serbian?) Orthodox wedding. You'll undoubtedly see a lot of yourself in the all-too-real selves authenticated on the screen. If you're sensitive, you'll come to care about them, empathize with their mostly-going-nowhere, bawdy blue-collar lives; sad lives about to be irreparably altered at the precipice of the Vietnam War. The rest of the movie could have so little visceral impact had you not spent this introductory hour with them, laughing and rollicking with them, getting pissed off at them. Like family. I predict you'll like them even if you're aghast, like me, at the drunkenly destructive ways they behave. Director Michael Cimino knew exactly what he was doing that first hour, depicting a wide array of mostly flawed (excepting Meryl Streep's classy codependent character, Linda) Everyman human beings filled with unfulfilled hopes and dreams, an innocence so to speak, an optimism (metaphorical of America's optimism at the time just preceeding Vietnam & JFKs assassination) so that we'd care about these poor men and women, like so many American men and women at that time, about to see their dreams obliterated by the madness of war.

And what could symbolize the sheer madness of a mad mad war more effectively than our two leading men, Michael and Nick, having been captured by the Vietcong, being coerced face-to-face with a loaded pistol, forced to play a sick, insane game of Russian roulette for the entertainment of their captors? I love that near the end of the film, Michael, home from the war, withdrawn, emotionally wounded, nevertheless out on another deer hunt, can't find it in himself to pull the trigger with a prized, beautiful buck in his sights. Why kill it, his expression seems to speak, when I could just as easily let those trophy antlers roam free? One of the most goosebump inducing, subtle anti-war statements in cinema you'll ever see.

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