9 / 10
Official trailer
The Deer Hunter is the Michael Cimino-directed Vietnam War epic that became a much-discussed American film of the late 1970s.
Cimino directed from a screenplay by Deric Washburn, based on a story by Cimino, Washburn, Louis Garfinkle, and Quinn K. Redeker. Robert De Niro plays Michael Vronsky, a Pennsylvania steel worker. John Cazale plays Stan in his final completed performance before his death from lung cancer. John Savage plays Steven Pushkov. Christopher Walken plays Nick Chevotarevich, Michael’s closest friend.
Meryl Streep plays Linda, Nick’s girlfriend who eventually becomes involved with Michael. George Dzundza plays John. Chuck Aspegren plays Axel. The plot follows three Russian-American working-class friends from Clairton, Pennsylvania through their preparation for Vietnam, their capture by Viet Cong forces, the torture they endure, and the aftermath of their respective returns home.
This is a film I find hard to shake. An hour of wedding, beer and deer hunting, then forty minutes of Vietnam that none of these men will ever recover from, and by the end I felt like I’d lost friends of my own. It’s long and it’s heavy, and I think every minute of the length is earned.
The film made approximately fifty million dollars in initial 1978 release on a budget of roughly thirteen million dollars. The commercial performance was strong. The film won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director (Cimino), Best Supporting Actor (Walken), Best Film Editing, and Best Sound. It received four additional nominations. The Deer Hunter is consistently cited among the major American films of the 1970s and as one of the canonical Vietnam War films alongside Apocalypse Now (1979).
The film’s depiction of Vietnamese characters and its use of Russian roulette as central narrative material have remained controversial across the later forty-seven years.
The Three-Part Structure
Three distinct structural sections make up the film: pre-war Pennsylvania (approximately seventy minutes), Vietnam (approximately forty minutes), and post-war aftermath (approximately seventy minutes). The opening section establishes the small-town Russian Orthodox community, the steel mill that employs the men, Steven’s wedding to his pregnant fiancée, and the deer-hunting expedition that gives the film its title. The Vietnam section depicts the men’s capture, the Russian roulette sequences forced by their captors, and their escape. The post-war section follows each survivor’s specific failure to reintegrate.
The structural commitment is risky. Most war films would compress the pre-war section significantly. The Deer Hunter spends a full hour establishing the world before the war. The audience experiences the wedding sequence, the bar scenes, the deer-hunting expedition, and the daily rhythms of working-class Pennsylvania ethnic-American life before the war begins.
The accumulated investment is what produces the post-war section’s emotional weight. The audience knows what was lost because the audience experienced what existed before. Strong war fiction sometimes depends on extended peacetime establishment.
The wedding is my favorite stretch of the whole picture. Cimino lets it run, the dancing, the drinking, the toasts, and I wouldn’t lose a minute of it, because it’s the reason the last hour hurts. Trim it down and you’ve got a war movie about strangers.
For Writers
A long peacetime section before war material can produce more devastating war material than starting at the war. The Deer Hunter’s first hour is wedding celebrations and deer hunting. The accumulated investment makes the war scenes hit harder. The lesson is that strong dramatic structures sometimes require extended establishment. What you spend an hour building, you can destroy in fifteen minutes. The destruction hurts in proportion to what was built. Resist the temptation to start with action. Establish the world first.
The Russian Roulette
The film’s most-discussed individual element is the Russian roulette material.
The Viet Cong captors force their prisoners to play Russian roulette for the entertainment of their soldiers and for gambling purposes. The historical record contains no documented cases of Viet Cong forces forcing American POWs to play Russian roulette. The premise is invented. The film treats it as if it were standard. Vietnamese viewers and historians have objected to the depiction since 1978. The objection is legitimate.
The Russian roulette also is the film’s central metaphor. Cimino has stated in interviews that the device represents Vietnam’s psychological reality instead of its procedural reality. The arbitrary survival, the dependence on chance, the destruction of agency, and the eventual addiction Nick develops to the game all function as symbolic content instead of as historical documentation. The argument has merits but doesn’t address the historical accuracy problem. Both can be true.
It uses an invented atrocity to make a metaphorical point and the Vietnamese characters who supposedly perpetrated the invented atrocity carry the cultural cost of the metaphor.
This is the one place the film loses me, and it’s why I stop at a 9. The roulette scenes are brutally effective as filmmaking, and I can’t get past Cimino inventing an atrocity and pinning it on real people.
For Writers
Invented atrocities attributed to specific real groups carry costs separate from the work’s other thematic ambitions. The Deer Hunter’s Russian roulette is fictional. The film attributes the fictional atrocity to a specific national group. Vietnamese viewers carry the cultural weight of a film depicting them committing acts they didn’t commit. The lesson is that fiction has obligations to the historical record when the fiction names real groups. Use invented antagonists for invented atrocities. Use named groups only for documented behavior. Otherwise the fiction does damage that the work’s other achievements don’t address.
The Walken Performance
Christopher Walken plays Nick Chevotarevich in a much-cited supporting performance of 1970s American cinema. The character is the closest of the three friends to Michael. Nick’s wartime experiences include extreme Russian roulette participation that produces specific psychological collapse. Nick disappears in Saigon after the men’s escape. Michael returns to Vietnam during the 1975 fall of Saigon to find him. Nick has become an addict of Russian roulette, performing the game professionally for gamblers in Saigon back rooms.
The Saigon sequences are the film’s emotional climax.
Michael confronts Nick at a gambling den. Nick doesn’t recognize him. Michael plays a final game of Russian roulette opposite Nick. Nick takes the final shot and kills himself. Walken plays the recognition-failure scene with sustained physical commitment to the character’s psychological dissolution. The performance ranks among the most-praised supporting Oscar wins of the 1970s. Walken’s specific ability to play interior collapse through stillness instead of through theatrical breakdown established the technique that the rest of his career would develop. The Oscar was deserved.
Walken’s final scene with De Niro is the reason this film sits so high for me. Nick looks straight at his oldest friend and there’s nobody home, and that blankness frightens me more than anything the captors did. Few supporting turns empty themselves out so completely.
For Writers
Psychological dissolution played through stillness instead of through breakdown produces more disturbing effects than theatrical collapse. Walken’s Nick doesn’t weep or rage. Walken’s Nick has stopped being present. The lesson is that strong characterization of damaged characters often requires showing the absence instead of the suffering. The character has been hollowed out. The performance (or the writing) shows the hollow. The reader fills the hollow with their own understanding of what produced it.
Craft Note
The closing “God Bless America” sequence is the film’s most-debated structural choice. The surviving friends gather for breakfast after Nick’s funeral. They begin singing “God Bless America” spontaneously. The sequence stages the song with extended close-ups on each character’s face. The audience reads the moment variously. Some readings emphasize the patriotic affirmation. Other readings emphasize the irony of patriotic affirmation by the people the country has just damaged. Cimino has stated that the sequence isn’t ironic. The characters mean the song.
The audience can read whatever they want into the meaning. A single closing sequence can produce multiple legitimate interpretations when the staging refuses to indicate which reading is preferred. The film closes on ambiguity. The ambiguity is the film’s actual final argument.
Does The Deer Hunter still hold up?
9/10. Cimino’s patience with that Pennsylvania hour, Walken hollowed out in Saigon, and De Niro, Streep and Cazale all playing people instead of types make this the Vietnam film I’d set beside Apocalypse Now. The closing “God Bless America” breakfast wrecks me however you read it. It loses a point, and only a point, because the Russian roulette is an invention hung on real people, and I think it’s right to hold that against it. Watch it, then read what Vietnamese viewers have said about it.
Frequently Asked Questions
- The 51st Academy Awards, 1979, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
- The Deer Hunter (1978), AFI Catalog
- The Deer Hunter (1978), IMDb
