4 1/2 stars
I think that more recent war movies have trained me poorly for Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1979). This film won a ton of academy awards and is widely considered one of the great American movies so when I watched the opening credits I was on the edge of my seat. I have to admit that at about 20 minutes in I was shocked by how slow moving it was. I was bored and I felt very guilty about this. The Deer Hunter moves along in three parts: Pre-war Pennsylvania, Vietnam, and Post-War Pennsylvania. In the pre-war Penn section the movie tediously invested me into the everyday lives of these young working class friends (De Niro, Walken, and others) and the community they are a part of. There are long scenes that basically just show them getting piss drunk. There is an extended wedding scene in which the three friend's passage to Vietnam is set up and the movie seems to loiter at this party for a long time without any major plot development. Even after the wedding scene the friends go on a hunting trip. I love De Niro's character, Michael, in this sequence. He holds up a bullet, "this is this," loads it into the chamber and fires it into the distance. I love this, the existential hunter. But even in this scene, which resonates with me deeply, I felt myself asking: "when the hell are they going to Vietnam?" Then suddenly, we are in Vietnam. Fire, noise, blood, and pain are everywhere. Scenes move quickly, scenes jump from one another without explanation. I found myself sweating during the Russian roulette escape scene (my eyes welled up as Michael and Nick make it to the third bullet). As the three friends float away in the river I realized that when it came to this movie, "I was not ready" (Nietzsche reference intended).
Movies now, even long war movies, often seek to hold our attention with action and plot development. Rather than open us to the disturbing grips of war by placing the track of the movie almost entirely on the battlefield and by showing us many moments of upsetting violence (see Saving Private Ryan or Letters From Iwo Jima or many other instances of the continual shock war film) The Deer Hunter exposes us to war by weaving a few moments of terror and helplessness with the mundane doldrums of everyday life. This movie, though I may not have the authority to say this, has been the most effective at opening my eyes to the ptsd suffered by so many veterans. When the movie returns to Pennsylvania nothing is the same, everything exists at a strange distance. When Michael returns to Vietnam to find Nick everything seems eerily familiar. This film is haunting me now not only because of its disturbing subject matter but also because, in a sense, it tricked me. It turned boredom into the ever present face of death. As the final credits rolled I stood up and walked out my front door with only a couple of minutes to make it to class. A few minutes later I found myself blankly staring at the ground beneath the branches of a pine tree unable to shake Nick's death wish. Mission accomplished.
