Analyzing Cimino's Film The Deer Hunter

"Are you convinced by David Axeen's argument, as articulated in his review, that Cimino's film, "The Deer Hunter", is racist, perhaps unintentionally so, but racist nonetheless? Why, or why not? This requires that you read the review (posted in the "documents and links" section), sum it up (ignore the references to other literary works), and react/respond to his critique.

David Axeen’s virulent critic of The Deer Hunter depicts Cimino’s film as being racist and simplistic.
We will first review his arguments and then we will analyze them.
David Axeen starts describing the movie as a Western, adopting all his values, and denies any affiliation to a new genre that would rise above this old type of films. And even if it goes beyond classical westerns it is too simplifying.
According to the film this simplification appears the most in the nature of the characters.
The Russian-American happy and loving community is crushed by the cruelty of the sanguinary Vietnamese. Or at least that’s what Cimino wants to show us, says the critic. Nevertheless the analyst states that the young men aren’t as irreproachable as they seem. He also reproaches the director to avoid any deep representation of Vietnamese whose action seems senseless and artificial.
He then argues that one of the main problems of the film is the freedom with which the director manipulates history and simplifies the Western to suit his needs. David Axeen says that he doesn’t need to neglect and transform the whole Western reality to present the personal transformation of his character. And he also criticizes the fact that, by showing this simplified Russian roulette kind of war, he completely disregards the actual victory of the Vietnamese and at the same time excites American
patriotism.

David Axeen’s vision of the film is very understandable, and if we see the movie from this unique point of view, looking for equality and historic reality, we would totally agree with him. Nevertheless I think that in his desire to reveal the apparent injustice he has fallen into a biased critic and as a result he has entirely missed the whole point of The Deer Hunter. The movie is indeed unequal in his representation of both populations, and it is clearly not at all a faithful representation of the Vietnam War, but this isn’t at all the main goal of Cimino’s. His movie is not about the Vietnam War nor is it a war movie. It is a movie about war in all its aspects and about its presence beyond war itself. If the director would’ve wanted to analyze both parties at war and to present a historical version of it, he wouldn’t have assigned only forty five minutes of a three hour movie to it.
The brutalizing depiction of the Vietnamese is only a way to horrify the public more effectively. Cimino decided to increase the contrast to its highest in the transition between the first and the second parts. The analysis of the Vietnamese isn’t relevant to the movie nor would he have had the time to do it.
The use of the Russian roulette is evidently not an accurate historic description because it was never used in this war but it’s symbolic corresponds perfectly, as David Axeen notices it, to the absurdity and violence of modern wars. And as little as he was interested in depicting true historic facts, Cimino wasn’t interested in taking into account the outcome of the war. The Russian roulette is then perfectly suited for the representation of the changes in the psyche of the soldiers faced to the irrationality of war.
Only a very defensive and almost artificial point of view of the movie could say that the film is only racist and simplistic when its main objective is a journey through the soldiers mind and a whole new representation of war and its devastating effects.