The Deer Hunter, directed by Michael Cimino, is a powerfully affecting treatment of Americans and the Vietnam War, seen in terms of small-town friendships, quiet patriotism, and masculine pride. It centers on a group of steelworkers from a Russian-American community in Pennsylvania. Three of them (Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage) go off to serve in the Army special forces. The film takes no view of the politics of the war. The men and their loved ones treat service as a matter of simple duty. Grief is the only thought when one of them comes back crippled, and another goes AWOL after a breakdown. The picture is at its most incisive when it explores how the embrace of storybook adventure values, while enabling the three to survive the war, can become profoundly distasteful afterward, and even corrupted into suicidal pursuits. This is far from a perfect film. The scenes in Vietnam are an uncomfortable, even gaudy mix of allegory and pulp, and the portrayal of the Vietnamese is often racist. But Cimino gives the picture the sweep of an epic, and he does a marvelous job of rendering the bonds of community and friendship in the characters' hometown. The cast, which also includes John Cazale, George Dzundza, and a radiantly expressive Meryl Streep, is terrific. The cinematography is by Vilmos Zsigmond, and Peter Zinner provided the superb editing. Deric Washburn, working from story material by himself, Cimino, Louis Garfinkle, and Quinn K. Redeker, is credited with the screenplay.
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