Coming Home

Hal Ashby, USA, 1978, 126 minutes

Over the last couple of decades numerous Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War have thrust themselves onto our cinema screens and while there's no doubt that some of them are definitely worth watching, none possesses the emotional intensity, the all-round greatness of Coming Home.

Jane Fonda plays a straight-laced, politically-naive housewife. When husband Bruce Dern goes off to fight for Uncle Sam in South-East Asia, she becomes a volunteer helper at a veteran's hospital. It's there that she loses her innocence. She meets embittered vet Jon Voight and comes face to face with the horrifing after-results of modern warfare. Voight is a wheelchair bound paraplegic, angry at the way he and others are being ignored by the war-obsessed U.S. of A. Fonda begins to sympathise with his pleas for better treatment and soon they become friends and, in time, lovers. Inevitably, matters become complicated when Dern comes home unexpectedly early and learns what his wife's been getting up to.

Coming Home is a sensitive and absorbing film. It's anti-war message is put across with amazing subtlety and clarity. Voight and Fonda deservedly won Oscars for their intelligent portrayals. They both successfully resist the temptation to turn their complex characters into stereotypes - the performances seem to come from within. Haskell Wexler also merits a mention for his striking cinematography.

Review by Stephen Townsend
Taken from EUFS Programme 1992-93