51. The Deer Hunter (1978)

Plot Intro

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.

Paul says...

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

Doug says...

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 

47. The Godfather Part II (1974)

Plot Intro

Several years after the events of the first Godfather, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) continues his life as ruthless head of the Mafia by going into business with one Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg). But both Roth and Michael come to blows and end up plotting against each other. Meanwhile, in a series of flashbacks, we see the life of Michael’s late father, Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro). After his parents and elder brother are murdered in Sicily, 9-year-old Vito emigrates to New York City, and as a young man begins to gain increasing power in business and community…

Paul says...

And here we are again - back in the lives of the Corleones. It’s quite a feat for a sequel to have won, let alone get nominated for Best Picture. This, and the third Lord of the Rings film, are the only direct sequels to have ever won. You could make a case for Silence of the Lambs but we won’t open that can of worms just now. 

I can only assume that audiences of 1974 were still riding the wave of “Godfather hype”, because this sequel is far inferior to its predecessor. In fact, this film was already in pre-production before the first film was released, such was the level of this hype. The Godfather Part II never quite reaches the same intensity of the first. I think the problem is that the non-linear alternating between the present day action and the flashback sequences renders the plot disjointed and lacklustre because it never gets time to build up before jumping to another timeline. Men kill and betray each other for various reasons, and then they’re doing the same thing in the past but for different reasons. It’s like a tired old car that keeps stopping and starting.

As a result, character motivations and developments get lost in the mire. Diane Keaton gets nothing to do other than sit in the background, and then suddenly she’s decided to leave Michael approximately two hours in. Her reasons are obvious, but it comes from nowhere. No full explanation is really given for Fredo’s betrayal of his brother Michael, Cuban politics are summarised quite insultingly just to get the characters there for a little bit, and Talia Shire’s Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress demands an explanation bearing in mind that she barely appears and a quick re-write could have eliminated her entirely. Are people really so obsessed with this franchise that they’ll vomit awards at it?!

At this point in the project, we are in an age referred to as New Hollywood. With new laws around who owns the actors and the movie theatres, less restrictions on sex and violence, and televisions becoming more prevalent in households, Hollywood had to change. As a result, younger producers and directors came to the forefront. Francis Ford Coppola was in his early 30s when directing these films, and 29-year-old Spielberg would be releasing Jaws the following year. These educated youngsters were heavily influenced by European, Asian and art house cinema, and now non-linear storylines, unresolved stories, character and atmosphere-driven plots and blood and boobs were more the order of the day. As we have seen, in some instances this works. But The Godfather Part II, which ticks every New Hollywood box, may have been fashionable at the time but for me it hasn’t lasted. It’s limp and lifeless and needed the intensity and innovation of the original.

A saving grace are some of the flashback scenes. De Niro does a great impersonation of Marlon Brando’s iconic performance, and his story provides much insight into the lives of impoverished Italian immigrants in New York. When Michael comes up against adversity, I noticed that the film makes a strong comparison between the two eras. While Vito was able to establish himself as a renowned Mafia boss in a time when his community was neither policed nor provided for, Michael is trying to maintain this Sicilian vigilantism in an age when laws were becoming tighter and provision for the poor was improving. Michael’s culture and masculine politics are becoming obsolete. It’s just a shame that the film takes so long to get there, and loses focus from it pretty quickly.

I’ll probably watch the third film at some point in my life. But it was nominated in 1990 and lost to Dances With Wolves, so we won’t need to write 500 words each on it.

Highlight

 The opening flashback sequences showing Italian immigrants arriving at New York and looking at that famous symbol of American hope- the Statue of Liberty. There is a sense of great promises and great opportunities ready to be broken or lost. Almost like this film!

Lowlight

That’s exactly the problem with this film- it’s constantly in lowlight. Even when someone was holding a gun on someone else (God knows who or why), I felt it more urgent to shout “Turn a light on!” rather than “Duck!”

Mark

2/10

Doug says...

Hollywood I have a problem. Or rather you have a problem. You’re size-obsessed. But as any experienced person will tell you, it’s not the size that matters, rather what you do with it. 

Hollywood, what is your obsession with having THREE HOUR FILMS? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, YOU DO NOT NEED THREE HOURS. The number of films that actually succeed in holding attention and being good for a full three hours is tiny. The only one I can think of, off the top of my head, is Titanic and that’s because it changes from a romance film to a disaster movie halfway through, effectively rendering it two 90 minute films. 

But here we are again, faced with another three hour film about a bunch of irritating Italian gangsters all muttering about revenge while standing annoyingly so far in the shadows that you spend most of the scene squinting at the screen and saying ‘is that the brother’s friend who stabbed whatshisface?’ 

Put simply, I do not care. I don’t care about any of them. Al Pacino is staring at the screen trying to look haunted. Diane Keaton is so dull that her best bit is when she rolls off a bed covered in a sheet trying to avoid being shot. The script is so bad. Sample line: ‘at this moment I feel no love for you at all.’ It is hackneyed, unrealistic and plain boring. 

I actually tried to take a nap halfway through in the hope I’d wake up at the credits. This was three hours of endurance. It may well make intelligent points about the nature of crime or corruption, but it does it in such a contrived, muddled manner that you begin to think the random person who slits his wrists in a bath had the right idea. And what was that person’s role in the film? Your guess is as good as mine. 

I think we’ve established that I spent this three hours bored and confused. Minor highlight: Robert de Niro was alright. And if the film had actually eschewed Boring Michael and His Boring Descent Into Staring Into Distances, and spent a sensible amount of time (what the hell is wrong with ninety minutes?!) plotting the path of Vito Corleone’s past and rise to power - it could have been interesting. The rise of an oppressed individual into a person of power is infinitely interesting. Or just watch Scarface which shows you the entire 6 hour Godfather cycle of rising and falling power in UNDER THREE HOURS. 

Let’s just take a minute. Moana is ninety minutes. It is a film that encompasses multiple strands and backstories; features comedy, adventures, failure, succeeding, discovering one own’s inner strength, and a beautifully illustrated point about evil and darkness actually coming from unhappiness and anger. And it’s ninety minutes. And a children's film! 

No. This is not good enough. This should not have won. They should put a higher wattage in their bulbs, cut their films in half and get better scriptwriters. Al Paci-NO. 

Highlight

I found an excellent recipe for Mexican Baked Eggs on google when I gave up trying to follow any of the confusing, overwritten strands, and I’m very excited to try it for brunch soon. 

Lowlight

Egotistical film-makers who think they can ask audiences to sit through three hours of their unlikeable dull work. Do better. 

Mark

0/10