The Deer Hunter (1998, DVD)

When it opened, in 1978, you couldn't give The Deer Hunter anything less than five stars - not without looking like a war hawk. This Oscar-winning film - starring Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep and John Savage - was easily the most powerful film of the year. It was frank, brutal, and bold enough to talk about the elephant in the room: The horrors of Vietnam, the demons that haunted a generation of vets and turned them into "ghosts in empty sockets."

Unfortunately, time has not been kind to The Deer Hunter. It's too bookish, with a story structure that forces the audience to watch a wedding that never seems to end. Its direction is slow, giving us a cinematic wide angle that sometimes works and often falls short of the sync between the music, the performances and critical beats of action. And if we're opening a vein, you won't like the sound, which is kinda stagey.

In short, this is a movie made 27 years ago, and it never lets you forget it.

On the other hand, if you can overlook its seventies-era production values, and Michael Cimino's pacing (and the loss of focus of pre-Spielberg wide-angle shooting), what you end up with is a worthy viewing - if you have the patience to watch. This is a film whose performances are easily lost because of the wide angle shots. It's like watching a theatrical production, but without the help of the spotlight. You don't know what to look for unless you "listen." Cimino, who co-wrote the story with three others, directs the film as if he's telling a story instead of showing it. Whenever the script, by Deric Washburn (Silent Running, The Border, Extreme Prejudice), lets the characters "tell" the story, a part of me wonders why Cimino didn't just "show" it. And when Cimino does "show" it, I have to wonder why he didn't go to more trouble to lead the audience. Onscreen, there are lots of telling details, lots of interesting, layered nuances - but you have to look for them. Cimino either doesn't think to point them out - or doesn't care to. The result is a viewing experience that is undeniably slow and plodding, but one that ends up being rich to one and flat to others.

We all agree about the plodding part.

The Deer Hunter is the story of Michael and Nick (Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken), two working-class slavs (They're Russian-Americans) who go off to Vietnam. Most of the film's first half is devoted to the world they left behind - their buddies, their gals and "the hunt." Between the wedding of Steven (John Savage) and the hunt, itself, it seems like we've endured an eternity of introductions, macho posturings and the perfunctory pop-song sing-along (second only to the slow clap in its degree of insufferability).

But then we get to Vietnam - and with all deliberate speed. No time is wasted putting Nick, Michael and Steven in harm's way as they are overpowered by the NVA. Taken prisoner, they are stuck in a Hell with two doors: one is a rat-infested cage just above the waterline, whose occupants look like human lobsters. The other is a watery cage beneath a makeshift betting parlor. For entertainment, POWs are forced to play Russian roulette. The winner is the guy who doesn't die.

This is a film about the ghosts of Vietnam, the first one I know of to speak about such unspeakable things. In my opinion, it was The Deer Hunter that made Platoon a box-office possibility, though I'll be honest - Platoon is still my favorite poison, next to Full Metal Jacket. To talk about what Vietnam did to the men who came home, one has to assume that such men escaped. And if that's the case, then you can assume that Nick, Steve and Michael found a way, though what they did and how they did it is something I'll leave for the seeker of lost treasures.

The real story here is not who wins and who dies, but what we take from a contest as morbid as war. As played by Robert DeNiro, Michael is a man who takes things seriously. He's not a glib conversationalist - which is partly why Linda (Meryl Streep) finds him amusingly odd. He's what you expect from Robert DeNiro, a man of action, who takes his action very, very serious. When he hunts, he prides himself on being able to take the deer down with "one shot." He doesn't like sloppiness. He likes a clean shot.

But somehow, Vietnam is the very antithesis of a "clean shot." This third-world struggle for independence against the French, caught up in the Cold War struggle between the advance of Communist and capitalist worlds, was a quagmire to end all quagmires. Conventional wisdom has it that the American soldier was no match for the Vietnamese when, in fact, the American soldier, like the British who lost the American Revolution, won nearly every battle that mattered. It wasn't a question of bravery or competence, but one of sheer determination, and the hopeless reliance on a regime that couldn't possibly maintain popular support. If sheer tonnage could have made a difference, Operation Rolling Thunder would've ended it. But how do you stop an insurgent army that numbers not in the thousands, but in the millions?

Clearly, the Deer Hunter's money shots are the ones involving Russian roullette, though the scenes of the hunt are some of the best cinematography of the period. There are wide-angle shots in this film that are second to none. But for my money, the movie's best work is in the little details, easily missed by wide-angle shots that only confuse the audience and bury the magic. When, for example, Michael comes home, there are bits and pieces of dialogue, well-wishers, the well-intended but unwelcome advances of a public that simply couldn't understand what it was like to be in that place - and to fight for your life. Watch DeNiro's performance. Watch his face slightly contort as he tries to maintain his composure, as he controls his response to these well-intended emotional razorblades.

It's utter magic.

And so, for that reason, The Deer Hunter is a film to see, if you have the patience to sit through it. Clearly, the wedding at the beginning is useful but plays too long. All the scenes are morbidly obese, but this Godfather-like beginning (which reminded me of John Cazale's role as Fredo in the Godfather) should have been cropped. It probably wasn't because the film's structure is all out of whack. You have to get to the centerpiece of the film - that torturous life-and-death struggle involving POWs - but there isn't enough material after it to really set it up with any sense of symmetry. The wedding is padded as if we need an encyclopedic knowledge of these characters before we can send them off to war. Today's techniques - both in terms of screenwriting and film editing - would have gotten us to the pivotal premise within the first half hour, not delayed it until the end of the second.

But if you're looking for great moments, particularly great performances, there are some scenes in this film that you'd regret not seeing. In that respect, I'd recommend a viewing if only to wait for those moments. In a way, it's like a hunt, and you do have to have patience to wait out that "money shot." Otherwise, you'll miss it and never know why.

P.S. If you're watching this film for the details, notice how Michael and Nick are two sides of the same coin. One has returned; the other is still "out there." Yet both men are still in Vietnam, in more ways than either would care to admit. With both men, "coming home" (the title of another Oscar winner) would be difficult, if impossible. It's funny how DeNiro's journey to Vietnam is metaphorical of the search for "the missing," a term that can refer to M.I.A.s of both the conventional and spiritual sort. Such food for thought is a reminder of why this film meant to much to so many in its day.