“The Deer Hunter’—gruelling anti-war film or blatant Vietnam war propaganda?

Press, 9 May 1979, Page 23

“The Deer Hunter’ —gruelling anti-war film or blatant Vietnam war propaganda?

They used to say that an author’s greatness was measured by the number of ways his ideas could be interpreted. The more theories that could be concocted out of his material, the better the literature.

That way of looking at things started to fall apart when even comic books came under the scrutiny of literary analysts. But much could be said for the stature of “The Deer Hunter,” both as a film and an art work, under the analyse-it-to-death method. So much bush league nonsense has been written about it that only the individual viewer can say whether it is one of the most gruelling antiwar films ever made, or the most blarant proVietnam war propaganda. Take your pick. Either way, you’re likely to be wrong.

Some critics come down hard on what they see as a “slant-eyed gook mentality” in the war sections. They are guilty of the worst kind of wrongheaded, narrow interpretation.

Without speechifying, director Michael Cimino shows he is disgusted by what the war did to both sides, but especially to his three Pennsylvania friends. Those who object that Vietnamese did not make their prisoners put guns to their heads gloss over the fact that Cimino meant the Russian roulette scenes to show the terror of being caught up in something you can’t control. Those parts of “The

Deer Hunter” are perhaps the most terrifying, gruelling things in any motion picture. If they are meant to scare the hell out of us, make us hope nothing like that could ever happen again even symbolically, they work almost too well. Some will have to look away, and others will wish they had. A few minutes of the film show a confusing scene in a mountain village. American aircraft napalm the huts, and apparently even a few of their own men living there as commandos.

By

STAN DARLING

Then a uniformed North Vietnamese soldier is seen walking up to a shelter where villagers are hiding from the bombing. He tosses in a grenade. The people are getting hit from both sides, with equal lack of reason. Whose side is the director taking there? Neither, and that seems to be one reason the Jane Fondas don’t like him even without even seeing the film. They want commitment, against the foul creeps who fought the innocent North Vietnamese. In Cimino’s fictional Vietnam, the addictive ■ gambling game has players blowing out their brains for big money in a suicidal human version of a cockfight.

That is where the film runs into its worst trouble; its images are powerful, but its symbolism is crude.

When prisoners are taken, they are forced to play the game. It is not torture for the sake of gaining information, but torture for the fun and profit of spectators. When the game is played in Saigon back rooms, the player himself rakes in money until his revolver goes off. - The game is a symbol of the war’s corruption, and has also been suggested as a metaphor for nations committing suicide. The sport is condoned by a uniformed North Vietnamese officer in one place,

by tradition in another. Does this mean that the film portrays all its Vietnamese as callow, chattering maniacs with no regard for life? Maybe, but most Vietnamese seen in the film are victims .of the war. They stagger along in refugee columns, rage at the American Embassy — where they are shot at for their understandable anger — and are seen in go-go bars. The director takes a stance that throws blame on everyone. One of his most angry scenes, and for once an understated one, is in a veterans’ hospital, where Masons in their gaudy clothes lead a bingo game in a pathetic attempt to get men to accept their crippling wounds. De Niro, the detached man who calls himself a control freak, meets situation after situation which

he cannot control. His distancing, even from friends, finally breaks down when he tries to get one friend home. Even that doesn’t work.

Many of us think the war was morally and politically indefensible, achieving little except a grudging respect for American stupidity. Arkansas Senator Fulbright used to call it the arrogance of power. All we saw was the power to kill and be killed with no end in sight. But Cimino has the gall, according to some critics, to show his Vietnamese torturers as somewhat less than human beings bringing peace and understanding to their white and Montagnard captives. Prisoners may not have played Russian roulette in real life, but it is one of the most stunning cinematic symbols of terror ever used. It is not “Bridge on the River Kwai,” stiff-upper-lip stuff, and would have lost its impact if it had been. Aside from the combat scenes, which are relatively short in the film-, the home life of three Rus-sian-American steelworkers, their friends and families is the film’s real heart. They are not particularly patriotic, but are going to war anyway. A few trappings of patriotism are put around them without being obtrusive, especially because the young men seem to ignore them, or feel embarrassed by them. That feeling is height-

ened by the returning green beret sergeant who can say only two unprintable words at the wedding reception when they ask how it was over there. Despite the film’s title, its strangest interludes are the deer hunting episodes. Cimino’s symbolism climbs high into the craggy mountains, buoyed by an elegaic choir, and gets stuck there, never explaining itself. What he meant by the hunting parts is anyone’s guesS, although it gives De Niro time to do some silent wilderness reckoning. He may be the detached one back home, but he is all right in the wilderness while the others straggle and lose control.

Nick says he likes the way the trees are in the mountains, Michael puts a lot of stock in the "one shot” method of bringing down a deer, and it is all pretty fuzzy Hemingway. At least the scenery—not from Pennsylvania, but from the North-west Cascades — takes you away from the gut-wrenching stuff in Vietnam for a while. In the end, the hawks have their “Deer Hunter,” the doves have theirs, and the in-betweens have another version. That puts it in the “most talked about” class. No matter what you think about the war, the images in this film will keep coming back.