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THE DEER HUNTER
1978
DIRECTED BY MICHAEL CIMINO
8:00 PM CARPENTER
PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
(182 minutes, approx.) Director:
Michael Cimino. Writer: Deric Washburn. Story: Cimino, Washburn, Louis
Garfinkle, Quinn Redeker. Cinematographer: Vilmos Zsigmond. Editor:
Peter Zinner. Music: Stanley Myers. Starring: Robert DeNiro,
Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep, John Savage, John Cazale, George
Dzundza, Chuck Aspegren, Shirley Stoler, Rutyana Alda.
As
filmmakers go, Michael Cimino is perhaps best described as an American
of Italian descent who, for some marvelously unexplained reason, has a
Russian heart. The Deer Hunter, beginning as it does in a
community of Russian-Americans in western Pennsylvania, certainly
unfolds with the epic majesty of a novel by Leo Tolstoy. As in War and
Peace, we attend a grand ball (of sorts) in the form of a wedding, and
inhabit, step by dancing step, the nightlong revelry which follows. We
follow the men on a hunt. (A wolf in Tolstoy, a deer in Cimino.) We’re
permitted to get to know these characters intimately, in action. As
happens for Prince Andrei and Pierre in War and Peace, two
friends in particular become the north and south poles of the drama:
Michael (Robert DeNiro), who is a natural leader, and Nick (Christopher
Walken), who is loyal to Michael and yet, inwardly, self-led -- a
mystical seeker with poetry in his nature. While Michael hunts for the
zen satisfaction of taking a supreme animal in one shot, Nick hunts
because -- as he stammers so movingly, courtesy of Walken -- he loves
the trees.
Both men also love the same woman, Linda (Meryl Streep). Michael
respectfully keeps his distance out of loyalty to Nick. (Michael’s last
name is Vronsky, notice: “Mikhail Vronsky” is the name of the lover in Anna Karenin,
lest you think this Tolstoy analogy is something the director wasn’t
conscious of.) When the two men unexpectedly cross paths in Vietnam,
they are taken prisoner after a battle, and thrown into rat-infested,
half-submerged tiger cages, along with another pal from home, Steven
(John Savage). Their only hope, as Michael sees it, is to embrace --
with cunning and gusto -- the game of Russian Roulette being forced
upon them by their captors.
This game was a point of controversy when The Deer Hunter first opened.
“There is no proof that the Vietcong ever forced prisoners to play
Russian Roulette,” went the standard complaint -- overlooking the
heavily documented and far more brutal fact that American prisoners
taken in the jungle were routinely caged amid rats and disease, exactly
as shown here. In this context, the Russian Roulette is a bravura
touch. It is a French game -- a point the film drives home later when
Nick, his spirit crushed by the experience, accepts a Frenchman’s offer
to play Russian Roulette for a living. By forcing their prisoners to
play, the Vietcong as imagined by The Deer Hunter
are accorded a dark history-conscious wit: “Here, this is a game you
taught us. Play!” By inviting us to suffer through this nightmare with
a set of sympathetic characters we know intimately, Cimino makes a
point larger than “the meaning of Vietnam.”
The Deer Hunter is a film which should, with time, make as
much if not more sense to veterans of the latest Iraq war. In
orchestrating silence, music, action, and swift unexpected movements of
emotion (superbly photographed by our artist in residence, Vilmos
Zsigmond) Cimino has dramatized the idea that there are experiences in
life you can never fully talk about. You can leave home, you can
journey out to a place of transformative terror and power, and you can
come back -- but what you experience Out There is a thing you too often
shut up about, as a way of protecting your own dignity, and that of
your listeners. That’s human nature. But through the power of cinema,
Cimino invites us to share such an experience through our imaginations,
and thereby live its consequences, from within the characters -- a
privileged, unforgettable insight.