Michael Cimino gives friendships and celebrations the time they need to matter. We value the patience and the feeling it produces in The Deer Hunter, while wishing he were less inclined to press his point once we have understood it.
Fi1m perspective
The wedding in The Deer Hunter (1978) takes time that another director might have saved for the war. Cimino stays with the celebration until the men’s friendships begin to matter to us. We were moved because he let us get to know these people before putting them in danger. His patience pays off here, although the film does not always earn the attention it asks for.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), his first feature as director, established a working relationship with its star and producer, Clint Eastwood. The expansive American landscapes were already important. The Deer Hunter made the everyday life of a community central to a war film, giving the fighting a force it could not have had on its own. In the Western Heaven’s Gate (1980), his elaborate settings and visual compositions again connected people to their surroundings. Year of the Dragon (1985), co-written with Oliver Stone, marked his return after the setback of Heaven’s Gate.
With collaborators including cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, Cimino favoured carefully arranged frames and detailed settings. In The Deer Hunter, though, the acting gives us the strongest reason to stay. Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken make the men’s attachment to one another convincing, including their difficulty in saying what they feel. Cimino allows their ordinary lives enough space that we care about more than their chances of surviving the war.
Meryl Streep’s Linda makes the limits of that concentration on men clear. Her restrained performance in The Deer Hunter holds our attention without competing with the more forceful acting around her, and she deserves more room. The film can be overlong and heavy-handed, particularly when Cimino presses for emotions the friendships have already earned. We still recommend it for the care he gives to lives that a less patient war film might have hurried past. Choose an evening when the wedding will not feel like something to hurry through.
Biography
Michael Cimino was an American film director, screenwriter and producer. He directed, co-wrote the story for and produced The Deer Hunter (1978).
Cimino was born in New York City on 3 February 1939 and died in Los Angeles on 2 July 2016. He began his career directing commercials before writing screenplays, including for Silent Running (1972) and Magnum Force (1973). His first feature as director was Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). The Deer Hunter won five Academy Awards, including best picture and best director for Cimino. His later films included Heaven’s Gate (1980), Year of the Dragon (1985) and The Sicilian (1987).
