The Deer Hunter

On Memorial Day weekend, I watched “The Deer Hunter” for the first time. It took all weekend to finish the three-plus hours. When I first started watching it, I got through the first 45 minutes, and I was too depressed to continue - and at that point, no one had even gone to Vietnam. The thing is that I remember working class industrial life in the middle of the 20th century, and I don’t want to relive it, and I don’t romanticize it. And neither does the movie, really - but when your blue collar first-generation Americans are played by young Christopher Walken and young Robert DeNiro and young Meryl Streep there can’t not be a little bit of a romantic glow about the whole thing. 

Having started it, though, I wanted to finish, so I decided to watch it a little at a time throughout the weekend. This is a good way to watch a movie that you feel that you should watch but that is not particularly entertaining. “The Deer Hunter” is not really entertaining - but it’s pretty good and even beautiful in spots.  

For example, on the day after Steven and Angela’s wedding (the opening scene), the five friends go deer hunting together (the title is not an obscure 1970s metaphor). They drive through the western Pennsylvania mountains in a grimy old white Cadillac still festooned with “just married” pink streamers, winding through an otherwise pristine mountain road framed by rusted guardrails, and they stop to eat lunch beside a clear mountain lake. The landscape is completely unspoiled except for the paved road; and the contrast between the gorgeous mountain backdrop and the friends’ goofy horseplay and their makeshift picnic lunch of white bread and cold cuts is beautiful and real. 

I liked the characters’ names, too: Mikey and Steve and Nick and Linda and especially Angela and Stosh. If you grew up working class and Catholic in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh in the 1970s, your parents knew people named Angela and Stosh. Maybe your parents were Angela and Stosh. And although DeNiro and Streep and Walken are unrealistically glamorous for industrial western Pennsylvania, John Cazale as Stosh and Rutanya Alda (no relation) as Angela and George Dzundza as John and John Savage as Steven resemble the young adults I remember from that time - beautiful and imperfect and full of life. The actors were all wonderful. 

*****

One of my criticisms of “The Deer Hunter” is one that several contemporaneous critics apparently shared. These guys were just too old for Vietnam. Men aged 18 to 26 were subject to the draft during the Vietnam War, and “The Deer Hunter” doesn’t even try to depict its characters as younger than late 20s or early 30s. They are all grown men working in a steel mill. Christopher Walken, who was 35 when the movie was released, could possibly have passed for 26 in the right light, but none of the others looked a day younger than 32 or so. So they wouldn’t have been drafted. 

And it seems unlikely that grown, employed men would have volunteered - Steven especially, who marries the pregnant Angela and then ships out practically the next day. True, she’s pregnant by another man, but if you want to punish your fiancee for being unfaithful, it would seem that cancelling the wedding would be the prudent course of action. Marrying her and then going off to war seems like kind of a self-own. 

The timeline is also off. It’s supposed to begin in 1968. Would the men have remained in Vietnam for five years? Because “Midnight Train to Georgia” is clearly playing in the nightclub scene, and that song came out in 1973. Other than career military, I didn’t think that we kept men in Vietnam for more than a year at a time. On the other hand, Robert DeNiro’s Mikey would certainly not have made Staff Sergeant in just a year - and how did he get to be a Green Beret? And when he finally came home, why was he swanning around Clairton, Pennsylvania in his full uniform? Did he not own any other clothes? 

These are all little things, of course, but little things can make the difference between suspending disbelief and immersing yourself in the story, and sitting on your couch with your phone looking up details like when was “Midnight Train” released, and how long does it take to get from E-1 to E-5, and is there a Russian Orthodox church in Clairton, PA? (There is not - that scene was filmed in Ohio). There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense. There’s a lot that doesn’t add up. 

And there are bigger things, too. I expected a racist portrayal of the Vietnamese (the movie was made in 1978) but lots of military scholars have chimed in on the Russian roulette theme, with universal agreement that this never happened. The Viet Cong did plenty of other dreadful things to American prisoners so it’s not like there wasn’t ample material for a movie about the horrors of the war in Vietnam. And how on earth could Mikey return to Vietnam to rescue Nick, and then get out without a hair out of place AFTER the fall of Saigon? As Miss Eggy says, “The HELL?”

*****

All the racism and sexism and what-the-hell historical inaccuracy aside, I ended up enjoying “The Deer Hunter” as a beautifully acted relic of the middle of the American 20th century. I might even watch it again. But not right away.