Three working-class men from Pennsylvania go and fight in the Vietnam War. They are Steven (John Savage), recently married, Nick (Christopher Walken) who is in love with Linda (Meryl Streep), and Michael (Robert de Niro) who also has eyes for Linda as well as a penchant for hunting deer. Needless to say, all three come back with various forms of physical and mental damage.
I have a slight advantage over Doug this week in that the two (yes, we have two) copies of The Deer Hunter on DVD did not have subtitles. Bearing in mind that sometimes I misheard lines or missed them completely, I can only imagine how arduous it must have been for someone who wears hearing aids to follow a darkly lit, 3-hour war film in which characters talk over each other with naturalism and semi-improvisation. So I’ll be writing this review with a firmer grasp of what was happening.
Having said that, I wouldn’t give The Deer Hunter any high marks. It has its merits- the main three actors plus Meryl Streep (for we have now entered The Age of Meryl) are extremely natural and tackle their roles with passion. You get a sense that they are friends behind camera and probably having quite a good time. The scenes in Vietnam are intense and briefly illustrate how gruelling this event was. But I think I will forever relegate The Deer Hunter to my list of “Films That Men Over A Certain Age Rave About”, along with The Godfather trilogy, Die Hard, and most things starring Harrison Ford.
My main issue is that the movie is far too focussed on showing these characters interacting like ordinary people, but with absolutely no backstory to any of them, or insight into the Vietnam War. The first hour is dominated by one wedding scene, but who are these men? Why are they going to war? How do they know each other? Why are some of them NOT going to war? These questions remain unanswered, and we’re expected to enjoy the machismo of these men because of their banterous shenanigans. The second hour focuses on their time as soldiers- but who are they fighting? Who are the Vietnamese and what were they fighting for? Again, no information is given. We’re are asked to assume that American soldiers were just there being tortured and killed by a nation who are obsessed with slapping faces and forcing people to play Russian Roulette. By the third hour, which covers the aftermath of these men’s lives, I’d switched off, and I looked up the plot on Wikipedia.
So as you can see, for a film that frequently appears on Top 100 Movies lists, and is important in the war genre, you would expect a lot more depth. I can only imagine that, coming just 3 years after the Fall of Saigon and end of the Vietnam War, many of the questions left unanswered by The Deer Hunter’s writers would have been automatically answered in the heads of the audience who lived through these events. For ignorant millennials such as us, the political goings-on of the time remain obscure.
So no, I didn’t like The Deer Hunter. Not only because it’s slow, one-dimensional and so butch that you can just taste the testosterone (we’re supposed to like a group of men who liberally use the word “faggot” and shoot animals for a living), but also because it’s nowhere near as profound as it thinks it is. It’s racist, notoriously uninformed, and shows about as much knowledge about Vietnam as Love Island does about couples counselling. It was met with a great deal of controversy upon release for these reasons, with anti-war protestors stationed outside the very Oscars ceremony where it won Best Picture, which I think is quite justifiable. The icing on this ultra-American cake is the final shot, in which the cast sing a very patriotic song about how great the USA is, leaving a bitter taste in the mouth.
If you want a good film about people going to war with excitement and coming back with trauma, then two previous Best Picture winners, All Quiet On the Western Front and The Best Years of Our Lives, achieve this with far more skill.
Highlight
The Russian Roulette scenes are, indeed, very intense. It’s just a shame that there’s no evidence to suggest the Vietnamese people play this game as frequently as the writers seem to think.
Lowlight
The final hour is such as drag. I suggest you buy a ticket to Miss Saigon instead.
Mark
2/10
Paul is right, this is a dull, offensive and ultimately pointless film. Yes, there were no subtitles and so I relied on him and Wikipedia to keep me updated as to what was happening, but ultimately there’s two major reasons as to why this is a dusty piece that should probably be left in the history archives.
Number one: length. Yes, yet again I’m finding myself astonished at the sheer arrogance of directors who feel their story is worth expanding out to a ridiculous length purely (one assumes) for the ability to go ‘look, my film is three hours!’ To put it into context, the opening wedding scene which should have taken around ten minutes takes over forty five. It’s bizarre.
Tautness is not a trait associated with ‘great’ films, which are allowed to ramble on and have about eight epilogues. And yet - I can’t help thinking about Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette - a stand up routine available on Netflix in which she creates a groundbreaking narrative and ultimately creates a blazing piece of theatre. It’s an hour long. Also Pixar’s Coco - which deals with Alzheimers, age, death, family, fame and music - is an hour and a half.
This film should have been an hour and a half. By the third hour I too was so disengaged that I spent most of it scrolling through Instagram and planning my itinerary for the week ahead. It is elongated and obtuse - and while audiences may have at the time understood the context differently (as Paul says), that is no reason for it becoming an ‘iconic’ film - if the context isn’t explained enough that millennials such as us can pick it up then the film becomes irrelevant.
My second point is more of a personal bugbear: I hate ‘improvised’ theatre and film. I went to drama school, I’ve seen literally hundreds of plays, I’ve been exposed to more ‘improvised/devised/cast-created’ shows than most people have seen Disney films. And let me tell you - nine times out of ten, it does not work. You end up with overlong pieces tiptoeing around the core subject with actors desperately trying to grab more lines or ensure the spotlight is on them. The only time it does work is when there’s a director with a firm hand, using improvisations from rehearsal to then actively create a script - which everyone then sticks to. Caryl Churchill, Mike Leigh - these people are able to do that, whereas here so many scenes have been gratuitously allowed to run on while the actors murmur and burble their vaguely misogynistic/homophobic ‘banter’.
And actually I haven’t even touched on the racism. Twenty years before this film, another war film was released that dealt with Asian culture (similarly the ‘enemy’ was a race stereotyped as cruel, Japanese instead of Vietnamese). That film was Bridge Over The River Kwai and yet they managed through the (far superior) film, to break through the ‘us’ and ‘them’, and actually show the humanity on both sides. Here we’re just subjected to a lot of Vietnamese people insisting everyone play Russian Roulette and then cheering as people blow their brains out. The actual existence of any Russian Roulette is uncertain, so the choice to feature it so heavily throughout the film - metaphor for war or not - is disingenuous and ultimately a low move.
Oh Meryl, you can do better than this.
Highlight
The Deerhunter theme tune is utterly beautiful, and is rightfully featured on many ‘Film Soundtrack’ compilations. Skip the film and just listen to it on Spotify.
Lowlight
Pick your favourite. For me it has to be the overlong improvisational scenes full of a bunch of men muttering. So so dull.
Mark
1/10
No comments:
Post a Comment