Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #467: The Deer Hunter

Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) is a prime example of how Christopher Walken is much more than a punch line. People often do impressions of him for his admittedly odd speech pattern, which sadly overshadows his great acting skills. In Cimino’s war film, the last he would direct before the financial disaster Heaven’s Gate, Walken plays a blue-collar worker in 1967 America who starts off as a happy young man only to be irrevocably transformed by the horrors of the Vietnam War. It is an amazing performance in a movie filled with some of the best actors of their generation also working at the top of their game.

I had wanted to see this movie for a long time since it appears on many Best Movies of All Times list and it has a rather infamous Russian roulette sequence that is so iconic it became the movie’s poster. However this is a three-hour movie so you really need to clear your schedule if you are planning on viewing it all in one sitting. Fortunately it became available on Netflix Canada this month and I had an extra day off recently so I made me a bag of popcorn and watched it over an afternoon. If you find violence disturbing, you might want to plan an extra hour to decompress afterwards because this is no comedy.

Things actually start off happily for the film’s characters, a group of life-long friends living in a small town in Pennsylvania. The movie’s first hour follows steel workers Mike (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), Steven (John Savage), Stan (John Cazale), Axel (Chuck Aspegren) and bar owner John (George Dzundza) as they get off work and get ready for Steven’s wedding. The wedding is a grand affair that must have required many hours of preparations on the filmmakers’ part since it involves hundreds of extras dancing, cheering, and getting very, very drunk. You also get the feeling the group of actors, which includes Meryl Streep as Nick’s love interest Linda, all have a great chemistry. You really believe these people have grown up together and have plenty of inside jokes as well as a few pet peeves about each other.

For instance the day after the wedding the boys all get in a car and drive up into the mountains to hunt some deer. Once they start loading up Stan realizes he has forgotten his boots and asks Mike if he borrow one of his pairs. Mike gets very defensive about this and refuses because apparently Stan always forgets something before they drive up. Since Mike is busy loading his rifle while this argument is happening and Stan is always bragging about the fact he carries a loaded pistol with him you get the feeling this could turn violent. Fortunately Nick defuses the situation because he is the kind of friend who wants everyone to just get along.

Throughout these bonding moments there is a dark cloud hanging over these characters since Mike, Nick and newlywed Steven have to leave their friends and family behind to go fight in Vietnam. An encounter with a cynical veteran during the wedding foreshadows that this war is probably going to have severe repercussions on them. By the time the movie reaches its second hour the three friends understand why that veteran was not too chatty since they are now living the horrors of war. Cimino chose to skip the training montage integral to many war movies and instead jumps straight to a violent sequence in which Mike kills an enemy soldier with a flamethrower.

This leads to the three childhood friends being captured by a group of enemy soldiers who like to force their prisoners to play Russian roulette. For those who don’t know, the game consists of putting one bullet in the chamber of a pistol, spinning the wheel, handing the gun to one of two players who hold the gun to their head and pull the trigger until there is only one player left standing. When the time comes for Mike and Nick to play Nick is having a nervous breakdown, but Mike is laser-focused on surviving and comes up with one ballsy escape plan. It involves putting two extra bullets in the gun. Do the math.

This sequence is one of cinema’s most tense moments and perfectly illustrates the randomness of violence and death. There is no way of knowing which turn would kill Nick or Mike just like they had no way of knowing whether or not they would survive this war intact. I believe The Deer Hunter is one of those rare war movies that have beautifully shot sequences of war while also being anti-war. There are never any talks of politics among these characters, but the third hour shows that war has brought them nothing but death and life-long trauma.

Seeing this movie is an often times tense, sometimes scary and at times sad experience, but it is definitely worth the three hours. The performances are all great, from Christopher Walken to the late great John Cazale giving his last on-screen performance. The film’s violent sequences are enjoyable in the sense that they are an example of wonderful filmmaking, but Cimino wisely shows that violence will scar you forever.