The Dear Hunter (1978)

Director Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter is a masterpiece. It has a tremendous then young cast including Robert De Nero and Christopher Walken, though I think Meryl Streep makes the biggest impression, you forget just how beautiful she was at that age, not to mention talented. The film is also intricately constructed which makes it just that much more impressive as it is one of the most naturalistic films I’ve ever seen. Take the beginning of the film, the first forty minutes or so covers just one day, but it is done in an almost cinema verta style, with each scene building on each other, but not in a forced, or apparently even directed way. You get the impression that this is a very important day in the lives of this group of friends, it is the day one of them gets married, and three of them prepare to ship off to Vietnam, but you feel this as though you were the characters, you live it with them natural as it would have occurred, valuing it as such, not just as the ground points for a larger plot later to develop.

The plot itself could be said to be the lest naturalistic thing about the movie, how many solders in Vietnam were actually forced to play Russian roulette for their captures (as incredibly powerful and intense a sequence though this may be). However there is nothing fake about the performances, and the intensity of this key event of the narrative, allows for the actors to express the collective national experience of horror and disillusionment that befell us through Vietnam, and it also makes the ending, which could be viewed as corny, work. That these are working class guys, whose home in Pennsylvania’s poorer quarters and implied life in its steel mills is its own kind of hell, puts them more on par with the Vietnamese among whom they serve then the elites of their own society, who are entirely absent from the picture. In fact I have a hard time even calling this a political film, though the trace elements are undeniable. It is mostly a film about people, relationships, love, and the horror of war, things eminently more important and universal then mere political joking about Vietnam. A worthwhile piece that has rightly been called a populist epic, it’s a work of art that finds great beauty, sadness and reality in its subject matter. Five out of Five.