The Deer Hunter is a very large film of the sort I might think to watch if I wanted to learn something about America. Having never seen it before, it reminds me of what something like "Life is Beautiful" might look to Italians.
It must be a film of profound resonance to a certain class of Americans growing up in a small town rough and tumble 1970s. Today, it's doubtful that there is much steel to be made as it was in those days. Tomorrow there may be no automobiles to be made as they are in these days. The Deer Hunter illustrates that boyish, drunken foolishness all paid for by a day's honest work in a small piece of America not too smart for itself to believe in God and Country through trials and tribulations until the bitter end. It strikes me as a film, at this late date, marking the end of some innocence but also of the permanence of some moral certitude.
I can imagine some looking back at the film and seeing an entirely naive America, one chastened to recognize now what the psychological tribulations of war meet out. I don't see it that way. What I find admirable about the characters in this film is that they are well adjusted to a certain type of domestic violence contemporary filmgoers would shun. There is no pretense in Cimino's ethnic Pennsylvania town. The people of the town are not simple or plain, they fill out the dimensions of their own lives, merely unburdened with the rest of the world, content to deal with what is directly in front of them. Their loves, hates, jealousies, fears all make them complete, not their comportment to any sort of ideal.
As a war movie, The Deer Hunter does a fine job in describing heroism. The simple and plain courage of De Niro's character is played straight. He never wears his uniform with irony, never mocks the import of the struggle he enjoined. Never tried to make more of his position in all of that than he was. He was always the kind of man he was and at war and proved himself clearly to be the better man. He was true to his friends, to his hometown, to his honor throughout. If war makes fools of many, there remain a few who, even without great intellectual or spiritual gravity, manage through it standing. De Niro's Michael understands 'this is this' as he explains the meaning of the single bullet - there is a time when no excuses matter.
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