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The heat is by no means gone, of course. Outside the awards ceremonies, a remnant group of Viet Nam Veterans Against the War shouted protests about The Deer Hunter, which in style and message is a world away from Coming Home. The vets echoed the criticism of many old antiwar activists, who regard Cimino's cartoon treatment of the Vietnamese (played in the movie, incidentally, by Thais) as screaming sadists, much given to atrocity. Fonda called The Deer Hunter "a racist, Pentagon version of the war" -a judgment she reached without having seen the movie. Gloria Emerson, who covered the war for the New York Times and wrote a phosphorescently indignant book called Winners and Losers, declared last week: "Cimino has cheapened and degraded and diminished the war as no one else."
Coming Home has at least the charm of its political clarity; it is a straightforwardly and movingly antiwar movie that is saved from being a mere tract by its rich performances and its compassion for the Americans who fought and suffered in the war. The Deer Hunter is far more elusive-more forceful, less coherent, more artistically ambitious but also dangerously close to political simplism, historical inaccuracy and moral kitsch.
The fascinating difference between the two films is that The Deer Hunter presents a version of the American experience in Viet Nam that is utterly at variance with the view, widely held among intellectuals, of barbarously overarmed Americans, a nation of William Galleys, doing battle against the frail, gentle, long-suffering Vietnamese. Cimino's victims are the rambunctious guys from Clairton, blue-collar heroes who took their wholesome patriotism to Viet Nam and there found themselves alone, morally adrift among savage Southeast Asian exotics who are forever forcing them to play Russian roulette. There is no record or recollection, incidentally, that the game was ever played during the American years in Viet Nam, although some old hands recall a few episodes in the '20s and '30s.
Cimino's tale may or may not be a bad description of what happened in Viet Nam; it depends on one's politics. It is the implication of American innocence that enrages some critics of the film. Partly the difficulty lies in trying to extrapolate a general statement of American performance in Viet Nam from the in dividual American stories that Cimino presents. The director, now working in Montana on a new film about the immigrant voyages west, speaks bitterly of Fon da's charges about his film. His characters, says Cimino, "are trying to support each other. They are not endorsing any thing except their common humanity -their common frailty, their need for each other." Although it may be reading the film too much as allegory, the ending, with the survivors back in their shab by Pennsylvania steel town, sitting around a table and softly singing God Bless Amer ica, has the effect of being an absolution, a subtle exoneration of the American role in Viet Nam. Cimino might have intended the scene more as an exoneration of the men who were called on to fight there than of the policymakers who sent them. But that is not necessarily the psychological effect upon his audiences. In any case, as Cimino rightly says, "It will take a lot of films to get at Viet Nam. It's still very mysterious to us."