From the Archives: ‘Deer Hunter’ — A palship goes to war

“The Deer Hunter,” which opens Wednesday at the National and Westwood, playing one week to qualify for Academy Award consideration, is an extremely ambitious and important film on a crucial theme — the impact of the Vietnam war on American lives.

In a year in which too few movies have tried to do more than divert and pacify, “The Deer Hunter” aspires to be unique and demands to be measured against the classic uses of the screen to illustrate the way we live and die.

The best passages of Michael Cimino’s film are in fact brilliant. The American lives that will be affected by the war are drawn from a rural Pennsylvania steel mill town, an ethnic (Russian) enclave of gritty streets, hard work, desperate pleasures and tight horizons.

It continues to be an extraordinary year for the camera, and Vilmos Zsigmond has caught the mill town at its late autumn bleakest, the dank streets and matted leaves and warning winds, the semis snarling past and the diesel switchers rumbling by on the elevated tracks above the frame tenements and the saloon whose neon signs are warming beacons in the early darkness.

The combat sequences, too, have a numbing authenticity, providing a brief but horrifying taste of the merciless and indiscriminate village warfare, and making My Lai comprehensible and therefore all the more dismaying.

In all its excellences and its aspirations, “The Deer Hunter” chooses to be an extended metaphor, in much the same way that Dalton Trumbo’s limbless, eyeless, speechless soldier in “Johnny Got His Gun” was an extended metaphor for the futility of war.

“The Deer Hunter,” written by Deric Washburn from a story credited to Cimino and Washburn and the team of Louis Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker, uses Russian roulette as its metaphor for cruel and random chance by which war picks its victims.

Viet Cong roulette it is, actually, since we encounter it as VC guards force their prisoners at gunpoint to play the gunpoint game.

(It is a savagely strong piece of filmmaking, agonizing to watch close-up, as the camera does. The setting is a partly submerged bamboo cage, crawling with river rats, the drunken guards betting and chortling and cursing, the prisoners screaming and dying. It is wrenching stuff.)

The game will recur, amid the feverish decadence of collapsing Saigon, back home during a deer hunt in the Alleghenies, and yet again one last tragic time on the last day of Saigon as the helicopters lift off from the embassy roof.

It does not cease to be horrifying, unbearable to watch, but it becomes, I’m afraid, more melodrama than metaphor, creating a movie which at last seems in part curiously at odds with its level of intentions, the poetic realism surrendered to a heavily engineered succession of events and the final statement rendered perplexingly ambiguous and unresolved.

Still and beyond the reservations, it is a film of excellences, never more so than in the performances by Robert De Niro and a remarkable supporting cast.

De Niro is Mike, one of the three millhand, deer-hunting pals who are going off to ‘Nam. Christopher Walken as Nick and John Savage as Steve are the other two. They are leaving after a beery wedding party for Savage and Rutanya Alda, who is pregnant although not necessarily by him, and then a last deer hunt with the other pals, saloonkeeper George Dzundza, John Cazale and bearded Chuck Aspergren.

The end of work, the preliminary beer up at the saloon, the wedding and the hunt are lingered over and have an improvisational feeling (whether or not they were improvised, and I suspect that they were not) that recalls John Cassavetes’ “Husbands” in the accuracy of the portrayal of pals together.

For De Niro it is a markedly different characterization from the dark and lethal introvert of “Taxi Driver” or the glib chauvinist of “New York, New York.” He is cool, laid-back, a loner who is also a natural leader, a strong and decent realist. It seems at least fairly clear that he is intended to be a symbol within the metaphor, the common man with all the uncommon virtues the national rhetoric gives him, including a pioneer self-reliance and a melting-pot richness of heritage.

Like most palships, these are not without strains. The late and excellent John Cazale as Stan is a quarrelsome, neurotic, pistol-carrying womanizer who requires more tolerance than he gives. To that extent there’s one in every crowd. Walken is another moody loner, and a complication because his girl (Meryl Streep) has eyes for De Niro as well, and vice versa. (Actually, there is some uncertainty about where the De Niro character stands sexually, and he catches a taunt from Cazale now and again, but if this was intended as a side theme for exploration, it is not pursued.)

Streep is a welcome discovery, a warm and intelligent actress who somewhat recalls Faye Dunaway, and although she seems almost too good to be marking cans in the grocery store when she could make it OK in Pittsburgh or even Chicago, she is wonderfully sympathetic and understated in the role. It is obvious that she, and a name Raymond Chandler would have loved, will be heard from again.

Like the smuggling episode in “Julia,” which works as a drama within the drama, the combat sequence, including the caged captivity, is a suspenseful drama within the larger frame of the movie. There is a daring escape, a rescue and near-rescue and then the pals, saved by De Niro, are separated.

It is then, too, that the fabric of the film separates, changing from the muscular but artfully controlled naturalism to the far more invented passages, including the appearance of a cynical and opportunistic Frenchman (Pierre Segui) who takes the battle-dazed Walken in tow and seems to have emerged from a different kind of fiction entirely.

Mike comes home alone, for the moment, with his chestful of ribbons and his memories. On home ground again, Cimino the filmmaker also appears more at home, and there is a first-class authenticity about the homecoming, the awkwardness of the greeting, De Niro’s sense of isolation, of his permanent difference from anyone who cannot know what he’s seen and had to do.

He is still the symbol within the metaphor, and a deer-hunting reunion demonstrates that he, for which read the American, cannot be the same again after Vietnam; there has been a loss of innocence (or naivete) but perhaps a gain of something harder to define.

Having created so memorable a hero figure, “The Deer Hunter” inevitably raises questions about what will become of Mike in a more specific sense. Back to life as it was? A new life with the excellent Ms. Streep?

But first, there is story as story to be played out: Savage has come home with his own legacy of the struggle, to be resolved.

(He is an impressive young actor in this relatively brief but demanding role.)

And there is that last trip to Saigon and a lurid confrontation with Walken, set improbably during the fall of the city. The fall has been impressively reconstructed in a clever intercutting of news footage and new shooting, but the private events, gruesomely violent, are closer to hokum than to the steely thoughtfulness of the balance of the film. You wince for the brain pan shattered, and for what is surely a miscalculation that neither heightens the power of the film’s statement nor is likely to widen its audience appreciably.

At last the survivors gather over a funeral breakfast and find themselves singing “God Bless America.” An affirmation after all? Yes, the studio synopsis suggests helpfully. I wonder, says the viewer, sensing — simply in the context of the movie itself — a bitter irony. Ambiguous, says the verdict: inconclusive either way.

Perhaps the movie is intended to be, as it sees the war to be, a cleansing, a purging of old attitudes, achieved at hideous cost in death, disfigurement, disillusion, but achieved nonetheless and providing a basis for a calm and rational future.

Perhaps.

The movie is long — three minutes over three hours — but like “The Godfather” it is so eventful that you sense time only in the gory delays of the roulette. Peter Zinner was the editor.

The effectively unobtrusive music is by Stanley Myers. Ron Hobbs and Kim Swados are the art directors, helping the mill town realities speak for themselves.

The movie is rated R Restricted, with a special additional cautionary note from the studio. The warning is well-taken, the violence is grim and graphic, and abundant.

It’s is a film to be debated and argued over seriously because it is an earnest, serious and impressive work, despite the reservations it is necessary to have about it. In a thin and evasive year, “The Deer Hunter” joins a thin company that aspire to greatness.