[Cimino's] attitude toward the material is the source of The Deer Hunter's great success and at the same time the reason it has been a subject of controversy ever since it appeared in December. Cimino shrewdly refuses to be drawn into a discussion of the war; against all temptation he avoids any trace of sententiousness. He presents the war not as a political event with political implications but as a great historic tragedy that fell upon the American people—rather like some gigantic earthquake that leaves tens of thousands of dead behind it. This is not how politicians and newspapers see the war, but it is how the America that Cimino is interested in—the non-political, working-class America that lives outside the debates of politicians and newspapers, the America for which Washington is almost as foreign as Saigon—actually experienced the Vietnam era. Something happened, and then...