‘The Deer Hunter’ Review: A Haunting Take on Vietnam

“The Deer Hunter” is a massive undertaking, a film of immense drama, incredible tension, and impeccable acting. It’s the kind of film that makes you forget about all others, because this is the only one that matters. The emotions it generates are that powerful.

Michael Cimino’s film rightfully won Best Picture at the 1979 Academy Awards, and even though it probably cost the next year’s “Apocalypse Now” its deserving win because they both take place during the Vietnam War, I don’t care. “The Deer Hunter” is in reality, despite what the Academy may have thought, a very different film from any other war movie I have seen. There are barely any actual war scenes, and you don’t follow characters throughout the duration of the war. You see a few snippets of things that happen to them, but most of the movie takes place, in the first half, before the war, and in the second half, in the aftermath.

Cimino lets scenes play out for so long that it feels like he is literally stretching scenes out, wringing them for every single ounce of emotional weight possible. At first, I thought that this just added to the film’s runtime of three hours unnecessarily, because most of the dialogue isn’t that important. But by the end of these long scenes, I realized just how important they were. Even if the dialogue is almost useless, what is important is the body language of each character. That tells you everything you need to know, especially because of the stellar cast. These scenes also let you spend more time with the characters, especially in their normal lives before the war, so you get a sense of the trials and tribulations of each person, and you care about what happens to them later.

“The Deer Hunter” features one of the greatest casts of all time, not only in star power, but in acting ability that comes through in the movie. Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, and John Cazale are each phenomenal in their roles, and add gravitas, feeling, and nuance to the movie. They are the reason that you care so much.

The other big draw are the famed russian roulette scenes. These scenes are brimming with tension, not only about what happens next, but also because you don’t want anything bad to happen to these characters.

Those are some of the heaviest and most haunting scenes, along with the ones in the latter half of the film, when De Niro’s character, Michael, returns home. There is a lot of ambiguity about what happened to Nick (Walken), and that is played perfectly be De Niro and Streep, whose characters don’t know what to feel.

The film is really about what war does to people, and in that sense, it is the best anti-war film I have ever seen. It doesn’t rely on blood and guts (although it is present) to make you hate war. It shows you characters you love and invest in, and then tears them apart, which makes you spill tears.

This movie is worth investing three hours into, and that’s probably the highest praise I can give it.

{★★★★}