Daily Archives: Monday, August 24, 2015

  • The Deer Hunter

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Cimino 1978)

    This was the third time I’d seen The Deer Hunter and my second viewing of it at BFI within the last few years.  I found it more than ever emotionally affecting although I may have been responding to the actors, and what they mean to me, at least as much as to the themes and the story.  You’re soon aware of the discrepancy between Michael Cimino’s masterly description of social life and ritual in Clairton, Pennsylvania and the overemphatic suggestions of what’s under the surface of the main characters’ lives and what may be in store for them in the course of the film.  Clairton is a real place and, in the period in which The Deer Hunter is set, many of its citizens worked in the local steel mill – as do Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage), the three Russian-American principals of the movie, who are about to start their military service in Vietnam.  Once the men finish work at the steel mill, the first hour or so of the film focuses on Steven’s Russian Orthodox wedding to his pregnant girlfriend Angela (Rutanya Alda), who’s carrying another man’s child.  The morning after the wedding reception, which doubles as a send-off party for the soldiers-to-be, Michael, Nick and two other friends, Stan (John Cazale) and Axel (Chuck Aspegren), indulge in their favourite pastime – deer hunting in the mountains above the town.

    As dramatised social observation (photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond), the preparations for the wedding, the marriage service and the reception are impressively staged and fascinatingly detailed.  The dramatic structure of the reception is indebted to the wedding at the start of The Godfather; the secret looks exchanged by the characters, what’s happening at the margins of the dancing and drinking – these correspond to the conversations in the shaded room within Don Vito’s house.  The deer hunt and the following sequence in the bar owned by John Welsh (George Dzundza), the friends’ favourite drinking place, are no less absorbing.  But the dropping of lead weights, whenever Michael Cimino needs to explain a situation or take things forward, intrudes occasionally from an early stage.  You hear it in the speech from Steven’s mother (Shirley Stoler) to the priest before the wedding ceremony, and in pale-faced Nick’s cryptic anticipation of Vietnam as he and Michael chat, in the lodgings that they share.  You see it in the drops of red wine spilling on the bride’s dress as she and her husband drink from conjoined goblets – the camera captures too deliberately this omen of ill fortune.  A spectre at the wedding feast takes the form of an ominous, embittered Green Beret, who wanders in to the reception.  When Michael explains that he, Nick and Steven are about to go to Vietnam, this man raises his glass and toasts them with the words ‘Fuck it’.

    The interactions of the main characters, throughout what is in effect act one of The Deer Hunter, are compelling – even though Deric Washburn’s script may not have clarified for the actors, let alone the audience, quite what they feel for each other.  There’s also an extraordinary episode between the reception and the next morning’s deer hunt.  Michael, verging on drunk, runs through the streets of the town, stripping naked on his way.  This is followed by a scene in which he and Nick talk quietly and with a real sense of intimacy.  Their conversation immediately registers as prospectively significant – Nick wants an assurance that, whatever happens in Vietnam, Michael won’t leave him there – yet it seems, while it lasts, to be trying to get to the heart of the men’s relationship.  At one point, Stan accuses Michael of being a ‘faggot’.  Stan has to be joking – Michael laughs it off anyway.  The men’s lives are strongly homosocial but the idea of homosexual feelings is ludicrous – perhaps not only to them but also to Michael Cimino, or the maker of any big-budget production about war and heroism in the late 1970s.  The homoerotic undercurrent is strong, though, especially watching the film at this distance in time.  A repressed homosexual reading helps make some sense of the relationships of Michael, Nick and Nick’s girlfriend, Linda (Meryl Streep).  When Michael’s had a few drinks at the wedding reception, does he make a tentative move on Linda because he’s attracted to her or because she somehow brings him closer to Nick?

    It’s in the middle section, set in Vietnam, that the disjuncture between the quality of the film-making and the thinking behind the camera is realised most clearly.  On its release, The Deer Hunter was politically controversial because of its ‘yellow peril’ characterisation of the Vietcong and, in particular, the Russian roulette that Michael, Nick and Steven’s captors force them to play.  There seems to be consensus that there’s no evidence of the Vietcong really subjecting American prisoners to this.  The first Russian roulette sequence is brilliantly edited (by Peter Zinner) and played, however, and is so viscerally compelling that, as you watch, it’s unarguable.  It’s a piece of dramatic licence that the three friends, who went to Vietnam together, are still together in the thick of warfare when this second part of the film begins but, after surviving the Russian roulette (and killing their captors), Michael and Steven, who is traumatised and severely injured, are separated from Nick.  He, after recuperating in a military hospital in Saigon, is drawn into the city’s gambling dens, where Russian roulette is played for big bucks.

    In the third part of the film, Michael comes home to Pennsylvania (as does the now wheelchair-bound Steven).  Michael spends time with Linda, including a couple of nights in the same bed, but his sexual appetite is negligible.  Not knowing what has happened to Nick, he can’t settle in Clairton and, when he learns that someone in Saigon has been mailing large amounts of money to Steven and believes it’s Nick, Michael returns to the city, just before its fall in 1975.  He finds Nick in one of the dens and, although the latter doesn’t at first appear to recognise Michael, he does so shortly before putting a bullet through his own head.  Good as his word, Michael doesn’t leave his friend in Vietnam.  He brings Nick’s body home and the film ends with Michael, Linda and others in John Welsh’s bar after Nick’s funeral.  They sing ‘God Bless America’.  In long retrospect, it’s hard to say whether The Deer Hunter is consciously God-and-country and xenophobic in the way its critics characterised it, in late 1978 and early 1979.   (The controversy was sharpened because Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, The Deer Hunter’s main rival at the forthcoming Oscars, was promoted as, from a political point of view, its polar opposite.)

    Cimino and one of the film’s producers, Michael Deeley, denied accusations that the film was right wing.  It may well be true that Cimino didn’t mean it be political at all – although, given the subject, that in itself would raise questions about the kind of intelligence behind the camera.  Julien (Pierre Segui), who lures Nick onto the Russian roulette circuit in Saigon, is French, which could be construed symbolically (the baton of ill-fated occupation of the country passing from colonialist France to the US).  Even if that wasn’t the intention, the film presents the deadly game as thoroughly alien.  It’s more than a metaphor for America’s heart-of-darkness experience in the war:  Cimino presents it virtually as the Vietnamese national sport.  That’s offensive yet it’s possible the Russian roulette sequences came to dominate simply because they appealed to Cimino as a particular film-making challenge.  He certainly met the challenge.  These sequences make for exceptional screen drama.

    The plotting begins to wobble at the end of the second section of the story – from the point at which Michael, before his first return to America, spots Nick in Saigon but fails to make contact with him.  When Michael is back in Clairton, the early sequences there are marvellous, thanks to the way they’re played – Robert De Niro is especially magnificent in this part of the film – but Michael’s pivotal visit to Steven in a veterans’ hospital seems artificially delayed.  The patterning of the deer hunts is a bit obvious too (although gripping to watch):  Michael kills a deer before he goes to war but can’t bring himself to do so once he’s returned from Vietnam.  Pauline Kael wasn’t wrong when she described The Deer Hunter as ‘a small minded film with greatness in it’.

    The great things include the ensemble acting, which stands comparison with that in the first two Godfather pictures:  the main actors’ dynamic verisimilitude is out of this world.  Christopher Walken’s physical presence adds to the sexually ambiguous import of the story – there’s a feminine quality in his face and his slenderness is somewhat androgynous.  Walken makes dazzling transitions between vividness (for example, when Nick dances at the wedding party) and blankness.  I was moved watching Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep for a combination of reasons:  not only because De Niro gives a fine, complex performance as Michael but also because he was just about always this good at this stage of his career; not only because it’s amazing what Streep makes of the underwritten character of Linda but also because it’s thrilling to realise again it was just the beginning for her.  (This was her second cinema film, following her small part in Julia.)  Streep was in the cast largely so that she could be with her then partner, John Cazale, who died before The Deer Hunter was released.  Watching him is moving in a different way.  Cazale is painfully thin but I loved the moment when the lank-haired, weedy Stan looks at his reflection for a few seconds and decides ‘Beautiful …’  Which also describes John Cazale’s acting.

    9 August 2014

  • Apocalypse Now

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Francis Ford Coppola (1979)

    I first saw Apocalypse Now in a cinema in Birmingham on the last Saturday of the 1970s.  What impressed me most at the time was the sense that you were experiencing the events on the screen as going on inside someone’s head as much as in the world outside it.  This is suggested almost explicitly at a very early stage:  there’s a shot of Captain Willard’s head, upside down; a residue of the images of inferno that preceded this shot share the screen with him.  Coppola holds onto the psychedelic quality of this moment throughout the film, as Willard journeys down the Nung River into Cambodian jungle to find the rogue Colonel Kurtz and ‘terminate his command’.  Apocalypse Now thus dramatises a bad trip in more ways than one and this aspect of the film remains its greatest strength more than thirty years on.   I don’t think I’d ever seen it all the way through in the meantime, although I remember our starting to watch it on television at least once.  The whole structure of the piece – Coppola’s imprisoning psychological approach as well as the physical scale of the imagery – demands that it be seen in the darkness of a film theatre.

    The opening – accompanied by (The Doors’) ‘The End – is superb both in itself and in what it anticipates:  the disorienting, insistent clatter of the ceiling fan in Willard’s room in Saigon foreshadows the noise of helicopters that will recur more than once in what follows.  The fact that the drunk, hallucinating Willard, a senior special operations man, is already and evidently screwed up makes for a psychological point of departure very different from that of Marlow, the narrator of the Conrad novella from which Apocalypse Now derives.  Willard’s mind is in turmoil before the traumatising assignment which provides the film’s main narrative and this gets across the idea that the American psyche was already engulfed in the heart of darkness that was the Vietnam War (the events described are meant to take place in 1968 and 1969).   The following scenes, in which US military intelligence officers give Willard his mission to hunt down Kurtz, are tautly directed and played – G D Spradlin is especially good as the senior officer and Harrison Ford does well in the small role of Spradlin’s sidekick.  Coppola’s ability to convey naturalistically the underlying tension in an exchange like this one and to move easily between this style and more expressionist sequences means that Apocalypse Now virtually picks up where The Godfather part II, with its masterly balance of personally complex and socially insightful elements, left off.   You can’t help having expectations that are sky high, even if your memory’s telling you they’re going to be disappointed.

    For cinema lovers of my generation, the real-life story of the making of Apocalypse Now – the overrun of the shooting schedule in 1976-77, the replacement of Harvey Keitel by Martin Sheen, Sheen’s heart attack-or-was-it, the marathon post-production between mid-1977 and the film’s release in cinemas two years later – is inextricably linked with the movie itself.  A sense of regret that the picture was not only a crazily ambitious attempt to make a masterpiece but that it took so much out of Coppola he was never quite the same again is part of what makes Apocalypse Now gripping.   There are enough passages of sustained brilliance to leave you in no doubt that this is, in parts, a great film.  Coppola handles the formidable logistics of the production while retaining a poetic sense; he brings off action sequences that have a visionary life as well as surpassing technical flair.   The attack by the US helicopters, scored by ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’, is a genuinely thrilling sequence.  The use of Wagner here might seem to be Coppola trying to out-Kubrick Kubrick but the accompanying music is much more than an ironic counterpoint.   It’s not, in any case, merely imposed:  the psychopathological Lieutenant-Colonel Kilgore orders one of his men to turn on the Wagner as their raid begins.  The rousing music gives Kilgore and his team a high – what’s especially good about Coppola’s use of it, in combination with the bravura film-making, is that we feel the adrenaline rush and the exhilaration of the bombing, at the same time as we’re appalled by Kilgore’s relentless destruction of people and their animals and their homes.  (And of course you’re reminded of the Nazis’ legendary identification with Wagner’s music.)   The helicopters return in the Playboy bunnies sequence, which reinforces the dream-cum-nightmare quality of what’s happening to the people on screen and the audience watching them.

    Yet as Willard closes in on Kurtz the film slows down – and it doesn’t develop any kind of different or compensating momentum.  There are still vivid, startling passages – like the boat crew’s attack on a group of Vietnamese on a sampan – but Willard’s voiceover seems to get increasingly frequent, and makes Martin Sheen’s limitations more apparent.  He’s a good, conscientious actor and his boyish quality is occasionally touching.  But when he’s not staring bug-eyed into the camera he’s not particularly arresting (and, because of that, you get fed up with the bug-eyed stare).  Sheen is reasonably effective as a straight man to the assortment of more eccentric personalities with whom Willard comes into contact but you never feel that his character has any kind of authority, and he’s not a tall or physically imposing man.  Sheen is particularly disadvantaged in this respect by comparison with Robert Duvall as Kilgore.  Duvall is no giant either but he exudes a force of personality that makes you see why people don’t argue with Kilgore.  (As Willard says, ‘He was one of those guys you could just tell was going to survive all this’.)  When Willard says that the prospect of confronting Kurtz eclipses his fear, you don’t believe it.  And Sheen reads the narrative with more reverence than feeling.  He uses an expressionless voice that’s always an actor’s voice (just compare Sheen’s readings with the anomic power Robert De Niro gets into Travis Bickle’s narration of Taxi Driver).

    In any case, the lines that Coppola and his co-writer John Milius give Willard are increasingly (and unnecessarily) forced attempts to draw out the meaning of the story – at odds with the fluency of the image-making and the sound design.  (The cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and the sound team, headed by Walter Murch, both won Oscars for their work.)  There’s some fine acting elsewhere in Apocalypse Now – from Duvall, cast triumphantly against type, and from Laurence Fishburne as the seventeen-year-old sailor ‘Mr Clean’ (Fishburne, who was just fourteen when shooting began in March 1976, is alleged to have lied about his age – you can see why Coppola was taken in).  Frederic Forrest as Hicks, a chef in peacetime, and Albert Hall, as the boat commander Phillips, are strong too.

    Dennis Hopper, playing a hopped-up journalist-photographer who’s become part of Kurtz’s weird, gone-native jungle kingdom, gives the film an immediate jolt of life but rapidly becomes irritating.   The Hopper character quotes a line from ‘Prufrock’ and, as the climax of Apocalypse Now approaches, the material’s links to distinguished progenitors – Eliot as well as Conrad – seem more and more like shackles.  The repeated intoning of ‘The horror, the horror!’ comes across as mere melodramatic underlining.  All Eliot did was use the line from Heart of Darkness ‘Mistah Kurtz, he dead’ as an epigraph to ‘The Hollow Men’ yet The Golden Bough and From Ritual to Romance are Kurtz’s bedside reading (and look almost respectfully arranged on the set).  What’s more, there’s a strong feeling, in spite of the literary credentials of these connections, of Coppola’s going through the motions at this stage:  he has long ago in the film animated the madness of America’s involvement in Vietnam.  The combination of military routine, vicious will and cluelessness that propels much of the soldiers’ actions here is powerfully shocking.  The big finish – even though you understand why Coppola feels there has to be a big finish – seems entropic and, to a large extent, a tautology.

    Except that, of course, just as Willard’s destination is Kurtz, so the audience has an appointment with Marlon Brando.  This was the part of Apocalypse Now that I now found very different.  I’d remembered Brando’s eventual appearance as part of the anti-climax, particularly the way in which the film seemed to grind to a halt around him.  This certainly became a tendency in his later years:  I remember reading an interview with John Gielgud even before I’d seen The Godfather in which he complained that Brando kept slowing things up.  The legendary status of Brando’s Don Corleone makes this almost hard to believe now but I think Gielgud was right – in spite of the greatness of much of what Brando did in The Godfather.   In Apocalypse Now Coppola delays Brando’s appearance endlessly:  even when Kurtz is on the screen, the director reveals the actor’s face in many increments.  Coppola treats Brando with excessive admiration:  a close-up of Kurtz washing his hands and face (which remains largely in shadow) has the quality of recording the private life of a holy man.    You can drive several trucks between Brando’s pauses.   And yet, because this is Brando, it’s one of his last substantial roles and he’s now dead, it’s impossible not to be compelled by him.   And he does some extraordinary things.  His reading of ‘The Hollow Men’ is beautifully judged (he doesn’t try to dominate the poem yet still manages to read it in some kind of character – as much as that’s possible with a conception like Kurtz).  Only an actor as daring and great as Brando would and could deliver Kurtz’s metaphysical pronouncements in such an understated yet expressive way.   Apocalypse Now is, as well as a bad trip, a long one and I got bored in the second half.  But Marlon Brando’s close-to-swansong is worth waiting many more than two hours for.

    7 June 2011

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