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Movie Review‘Deer Hunter’ powerful, year s bestces, and it shows clearly how the traits that made Michael weird” in Pennsylvania make him a hero in Vietnam.★ ★ ★The Deer Hunterwith Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep. A Universal-EMl Films production, released by Universal. Rating: R — Restricted; under 17 not admitted without parent or adult guardian.9By Mike DeupreeGazette stall writerAnyone who watched the Oscar presentations last week, and who hasn’t seen The Deer Hunter,” might be expected to believe: (1) it was the best movie released in 1978; and (2) it’s about the Vietnam war.Yes and no, respectively.The Deer Hunter” is an intensely powerful film, easily the best of the year. But it isn’t a story about Vietnam, even to the extent that Moby Dick” is a story about a whale.It is a story of friendship, leadership and heroism, about life in a segment of an American community. It’s about how groups sort themselves into some kind of order and maintain that order despite trauma from outside the group.The trauma in this case is war — Vietnam, because the film is set in that period — but The Deer Hunter is making a statement about people, not about the war or even how that war, specifically, affected Americans.The group consists of five young men who work together in a steel mill in a small Pennsylvania town.As the film opens, Steven (John Savage) is about to be married, and will soon be going to Vietnam with Michael (Robert De Niro) and Nick (Christopher Walken).The day after the wedding Michael, Nick, Axel (Chuck Aspegren), Stan (John Cazale) and John (George Dzundza), who owns the bar where they congregate, go into the nearby mountains for a final deer hunt before the group is separated.The film takes the three (Mike, Nick and Steven) into combat in Vietnam, through an ordeal as prisoners of war and eventually back home, where the ones who remain try to rearrange their lives in light ofthe changes forced on them by the pressures of war.It’s a long movie (over three hours with no intermission), but it’s hard to see how it could be cut much without serious damage, and it certainly doesn’t drag.It’s divided roughly into thirds.The first hour introduces the characters, with much of it devoted to the traditional, ritualistic marriage of Steven and Angela (Rutanya Alda), and to the combination wedding feast and farewell party that follows.The second hour is mostly taken up with the war, and the final hourwith the aftermath.The characters and relationships are complicated, but familiar and not difficult to understand. As in any group, some friendships are stronger than others.Michael is the acknowledged leader, respected and loved by his friends even though they occasionally refer to him as weird. He tends to see things in absolute terms, and he and Nick are closer to each other than to the others.He can accept them as friends, though, even fairly close friends, without blinding himself to their faults.So can the viewers. One of the keys to the film’s ability to affect people so deeply is the way director Michael Cimino takes them in and makes them a part of it instead of setting them up as outsiders looking in.The film is, in many ways, about belonging, and Cimino makes the viewer feel he belongs.From almost the beginning, in a great early scene where the men begin spontaneously singing along with the juke box at the tavern, the film takes the perspective of anotherRobert De Niromember of the group.We like some of the people more than others, we know them all as friends, and it makes what happens to them really personal and thus really important.Other things — be it an anonymous speeding truck driver or a war — are outside, only significant as they affect the group.And because of that involvement, if you’re still with them at the end, the final scene can just blow you away.The involvement also helps you swallow some of the flaws, of which The Deer Hunter” has its share. Michael’s inability to kill a deer when he returns from the war, the bad luck omen at the wedding, the appearance of a Green Beret at the wedding feast, the choir music when Michael goes into the mountains, are among several incidents in the film that are a little too pat.When the group drives back from their hunt with a deer slung on the hood of the car, you know that before the movie ends you’ll see one of them in a similar position.Those things do less damage than they could, perhaps because the mind isn’t given enough free time to dwell on them.There are some really magnificent performances. Those of De Niro, Walken and Meryl Streep, as Nick’s fiance, have been well publicized, but the supporting cast is exceptional, too, especially Dzundza as the tavern owner, and Cazale — who died of cancer shortly after the film was completed *— as Stan,There are any number of really memorable scenes.And finally, it’s hard to imagine a more gripping device than the Russian roulette theme that pervades so much of the movie. It’s apparently an invention of Cimino’s, not a depiction of an actual practice, but it provides some almost unbearably tense moments. It’s also a fine allegory of a life that’s made up of difficult choi-THE PERSONAL perspective may be what has led to some of the criticism of The Deer Hunter,” which has been called racist, simplistic and chauvinistic in its treatment of the war, and has been scored for ducking the moral issues of Vietnam.It certainly ducks them — it never refers to them at all — but why should it?The characters are involved in the war because it’s there and they know they’re expected to fight in it. There isn’t a word either of support or criticism of the reasons for the war, nor the conduct of it, in the movie because that isn’t really important tothem.The Viet Cong are bad, period.Not because The Deer Hunter” is trying to make a hawkish political statement, but simply because that’s the view Michael, Steven and Nick would have — and so would the audience, as one of their buddies.Condensed from a review appearing in Saturday's Gazette.Buyer and Seller Meet in the Want AdsRead theAuto AdsClassified I GOHMANREALTORS®COMMERCIAL INVESTMENTDIVISIONOSCO118 E. College St.Iowa City207 2nd Ave. SE Downtown Cedar RapidsPHOTO SPECICOLOR FI LADEVELOPED and PRIN12EXPOSURE
Newspaper Details
The Gazette Weekly News Magazine
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, US
Wed, Apr 18, 1979
Page 2
Full Page
Clipped by
Jon C.
NJ, USA 13 Jan 2020
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