Best Picture Winners: The Deer Hunter

A movie that starts out with a wedding and then goes into the intensity and tragedy of war. 

The next film in my Best Picture Winner series is, The Deer Hunter directed by Michael Cimino is a story about humanity in a sense. It's basically about the lives of these men and their familes in a small town. We see them working in a refinery in the beginning and it's all leading up to a wedding of Steve and Angela and all of his buddies are in the wedding. At the wedding, which takes up the first 45 minutes of the film, it is annouced that they are going to war. 

Michael (Robert DeNiro) who is the strong one of the guys, he hunts deer, he doesn't like how fast things are changing, he is there for Steve and Nick when they are on the front lines, he shows incredible courage and tries to help his fellow comrads through the horror and violence going on around them. 

When he comes home, he has to deal with the aftermath of what we went through and he holds a lot of in and when he does go hunting again, he can't bring himself to shoot a deer. I love the symbolism in that and it shows that what he endured during the war means that he can't bring himself to take anymore life, or that is watch it die. Earlier in the film, we saw Nick shoot a deer and when the deer was falling down and dying, they focused on its eyes, which even though it was hard for me to watch, showed that he was essentially taking a life, even if it was for hunting puproses and an animal. It's still life and I think we see that throughout the whole film. 

At the end of the day, the movie is about humans and existence and survival and the realism that goes with that. This was the 1970s, these men lived this way then, they talked like that, they did those things, movies during that time were about the gritty, realism of life. That's why they tended to be filmed in more muted colors and the streets were more run down looking and things like that. It's about the trials that they faced, going to war, dealing with that experience and coming home and never completely feeling like who they once were. 

Maybe this movie didn't have a blantant message to it and maybe it was just supposed to be about existence and humanity, I don't know, but we all take something different away from films that we watch and for me, this is what I got out of it. 

While, the film was very slow paced, overall I think it was as good film. For being the type of film that it was, it deserved to win Best Picture.