Review of The Deer Hunter (1978) by Brad Y — 30 Sep 2013

The Deer Hunter is an exemplary war film for many reasons. It demands your heart's compassion and your mind's attention. The performances are spot on from the main characters, which is of course of utmost importance due to any war film's need for the audience's realisation of the effects war has on so many people. One can notice this from De Niro's Michael, the war veteran (in the latter half of the film), from Walken's disturbed Nick and from Streep's Linda, who is also troubled in more ways than one making her character alone a complex aspect of this brutal but beautiful character study of a picture.

Some may be turned off by the film's length, being three hours long, while others will turn a blind eye probably because of the film's reputation as a classic. However, I am a firm believer that it is necessary to be as long as it is. Firstly, it requires depth of character study, in other words we have to care about the people we are watching (this is partly due to the process of the bittersweet scenes from the start leading to the ingenious quick cut to the scenes of violence and claustrophobia the characters experience in Vietnam), it requires epic status partly because of the length of the war and the length of time it has remained etched into people's memories among many other reasons.

While the film as a whole has gained much acclaim, it is the set pieces that pull the film through to gold status. The obvious scenes to discuss would be the Russian roulette ones. They would deserve high praise even if the rest of the film were to be excruciatingly poor. Anyone I know that has seen it has effectively said the same thing, it is fist clenchingly vexing but at the same time, extremely upsetting. It has been and always will be one of those scenes that has unmatched emotional power. Another of the better scenes would be the scene where John Cazale, who plays a friend of the to-be-exported for service, (an extremely selfish and hot-headed friend but a friend nonetheless) begs Michael for his spare pair of boots and is then driven to insult him as retaliation for not lending him them. While it is a heated and intense scene, it still has a sense of comedy to it but ultimately it increases our sympathy for these people.