It is often said that a true filmmaker will do anything to see their vision transferred to the screen. After the success of his screenplay for "The Exorcist," William Peter Blatty mortgaged his house and practically sold everything he owned (even soliciting the first possible on-screen product placement) to make his dream project, 1980's "The Ninth Configuration." Directors as megalomaniacs are commonplace today throughout the history of film. In the Seventies, having secured just his second film to helm, Michael Cimino gambled everything on making American film's first official venture into the Vietnam era.
The journey of "The Deer Hunter" to screen needs almost as long as the three hours and three minutes of the epic. For economy, let's just say Cimino did more than direct and may have wanted full credit for it after its success. Starting as an optioned story about Las Vegas gamblers playing the deadly game of Russian Roulette, "The Deer Hunter" expanded into an indelible fading vision of the American Dream. Overshot and far over budget, bringing the elegiac "The Deer Hunter" to screens everywhere in 1978 turned out to be worth the 15 million dollar investment.
On the strength of the first act alone, "The Deer Hunter" qualifies as a classic in all of cinema. In a fictional Western Pennsylvania steel town (Clairton,) we follow the last weekend of three of its residents before they leave for Vietnam. Supposedly, it is late 1968. Cimino posits that we will figure it out as they watch football in a bar and 1967's "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" by Frankie Valli plays a fundamental role in uniting the threads and events of their pre-war lives. However, most great war films rarely worry about chronology.
Cimino and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond keep a great distance from their subjects turning every realistic backdrop into a classic use of mise-en-scene. In the steel mill, the workers resemble Hephaestus managing coke as it is tamed even while flowing like streams of lava from a volcano. Inside the mill, their goodbyes from the other workers are shot as they walk through showers, locker rooms, and hallways all teeming with people who must be murmuring "Good luck." It does not matter. You cannot hear it. You are not supposed to. What Cimino wants you to see are the faces of the protagonists as humans with that glint in their eyes associated with transferring pride in your work into pride as a soldier.
There is a lot of criticism about the length of the first act. Forty-five years later, it is still safe to say they waste no shots. We are allowed to see Mike, Nick, and Steven (plus their entourage) celebrating life as it is. More importantly, they are young, brash, and full of life in a town that has rain-soaked streets, muddy yards, and the general rundown/lost-in-time look of industrial towns. The bar is cramped. The hall and the church where they hold the wedding and party seem larger than the steel mill. Mike (as played with meticulous detail by Robert DeNiro) must hunt in the mountains for one last time before they ship out. (To his credit, Cimino's abrupt transition from the pastoral early-morning hunt in the mountains to the sweat-soaked rattling confusion in the brush of Vietnam really delivers a shock to the system.)
We see a lot of the characters in doorways, windows, and mirrors (an old Douglas Sirk trick.) However, not because they seek reflection or even the common use as a framing device. We experience them here as an implied narrative thread that nearly everyone you see is about to pass into another place in their lives. Meryl Streep hurriedly prepares a meal (in her bridesmaid's dress) in a dark kitchen where there is enough of a rumble off-screen - you might pause it to investigate. What waits for her upstairs is even more damaging. As horrific as this incident is we are not allowed as viewers to see the bruises until the main characters do. Violence against women rears its ugly head early in "The Deer Hunter" and it is hard not to see it again in other terrible acts.
In the end, that process of seeing/re-seeing may be the reason for the length of the first act. It is not necessarily looking to explain the complicated relationships between this group of people who grew up together (but possibly have not yet grown up.) When we experience anger, frustration, and jealousy from these characters - it is always from a distance. Christopher Walken sees the way Robert DeNiro is looking at his love interest, Meryl Streep as dancing goes on around him. The mysterious Green Beret wanders into the wedding party and refuses to talk about Vietnam to the three who are about to leave for it. We see them like animals. Like boys. Each clawing at the other just to talk to him - and then repelled enough to hold each other back from a different kind of clawing. "The Deer Hunter" is three stories told together by their most common threads. It has to be unflinching to be as believable as their daily lives in the mill, and the bar, and finding glimmers of hope on those rainy, muddy streets.
