March 2021
The Oscars Fix From Fix
A reevaluation and review of previous best picture winners. — McCartney Fix, Co-News Editor
“The Deer Hunter” Dir. Michael Cimino
Photo sourced from Alternate Movie Posters
A gorgeous alterante poster depicting the conflict between civilian life and wars lasting impact.
Feature 12
The Deer Hunter is flawless, not in the traditional sense of truly achieving perfection, but in the more intimate sense of its shortcomings aiding in its premises full realization. The film follows average, unremarkable people from a wholly uninteresting mill city, thrust into a situation of unimaginable scale and a conflict of unimaginable destruction, allowing the camera to observe how they cope, or perhaps fail to. The ensemble embodying these split psyches and broken people is what truly sells the film, even to an audience member uninterested in the time period, or unimpressed with the films screenplay. De Niros balancing act of sanity, Walkens descent into madness, and Streeps wheepy, strained portrayal of grief and the complexities of love are of particular note, though no performer on set misses as much as a beat. Chiminos direction matches the mastery of the performances step for step,fully immersing us in the war time sequences and allowing a cold, detached, lens through which the mens post-war demons are captured. Much has been made of how Chimino wrote these characters, and there turmoil, with special note often made of the Russian roulette scene, perhaps the greatest 4 minutes in the history of film. The cinematography provides us with the harrowing perspective as we see these men wear expressions of sheer terror, Walken trembling and stammering, as De Niro attempts to provide a stoic facade soon shattered by the weight on the shifting chamber, a pin drop can be heard over the rowdy crowd, each twitch of the trigger bringing ever closer the bullet to the barrel, in a glorious release of tension, a symphony of violence unfolds, concluding perhaps cinemas greatest four minutes. The film begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral, containing the whole spectrum of emotions in between. The Deer Hunter is more than a quintessential war film, it is a masterful examination of small town American life and those who lead it. Its representation of repressed emotions and subconscious PTSD is harrowing, allowing us a birds eye view to watch how each man keeps it together, or at least keeps up appearances. You can take the soldier out of the war, but never the war out of the soldier.
