Hal Ashby’s Coming Home: A Facile Tale on the War Experience
There is nothing more improbable than having a “MAGA or die” republican fall in love with a tattoed liberal — something Hal Ashby’s Coming Home has ease to show and pretend to its audience that it’s totally fine even if we, 42 years later, know that Jane Fonda will never even dare have sex with Jon Voight. Politics aside, the film tries to tell the story of Sally (Fonda), a helpless/clueless stay-at-home wife who volunteers at a Veterans’ Hospital while her husband, Bob(Bruce Dern), is in Vietnam. There, she rekindles with an old friend, Luke Martin (Voight), now a paraplegic after fighting the war, suffering from PTSD, which corrupts his mind with anger. They slowly (and unconventionally, of course) fall in love, which makes her slowly responsible for her husband’s demise, when he returns from Vietnam, also suffering from PTSD.
There’s this really interesting thread that Coming Home follows — in which we see, in quasi-real time, Sally’s physical distancing from Bob as she falls in love with Luke. She becomes magnitized by his charm and his free, liberal (imagine that) spirit. Both Fonda and Jon Voight give incredible performances, both deserving of an Academy Award win, especially Voight who perfectly understands the character — he has charm, but can’t really communicate it as his mind is constantly fed with images of the past, of the war he now finds pointless. I also appreciate the fact that we never see any images of war, but only see the people coming back from it — their personalities aren’t the same due to the horrors they’ve seen. This is where Bruce Dern comes in. We see him during the opening credits running through The Rolling Stones’ Out of Time, and then boasting about how great the war is, as it will give the Americans an opportunity to progress in society, impervious to what he’s going to see over there. When he comes back, his mindset is completely changed and shattered. He gives the middle finger to peaceful protestors, he resorts to alcohol to forget what he saw and is inherently agressive to Sally. He needs emotional support, and believes Sally will help him, until he realizes, from FBI agents, that Sally had an affair with Luke and fell in love with him while he was away, causing him to break down in tears, with a gun pointing at Sally and Luke.
That “boiling point”, scored to the sounds of The Chambers’ Brothers Time Has Come Today, signifies how betrayed he feels by Sally, who, slowly, caused his psychological outrage. By caring about herself for once, with a conservative husband who doesn’t want her to work or even to do something remotely interesting, and finally feeling free, liberated, with actual friends who not only care about her, but allow her to emancipate in society, she (and Luke) are the ones responsible for Bob’s eventual suicide. I thought to myself, when we see Bob swimming to his death, “Wow”. There was something that I missed when I initially watched it, but, as I was thinking about it more, I became blown away by how every action we see causes Bob’s demise, in which I became floored by its ending and its incredible performances.
It’s a shame, however, that Coming Home presents a rather facile, and badly paced story. Instead of delving deep into the pains and anguishes of Luke (and Bob!), Hal Ashby prefers to present a cookie-cutter, paint-by-numbers “helpless woman with a strict husband falls in love with a free-spirit while her husband is away” story. A story that Ashby, unfortunately, can’t get away from. There are many sequences that feel inherently pointless to the story and/or messages at hand — because everything happens one-too-quickly, without having the opportunity to explore at the protagonists’ psyche. A film like this needs time to not only present the characters, but explore their own form of psychological angsts, something Ashby never onces does. He doesn’t want to showcase images of war, fine, but he needs to showcase exactly what this war is doing to individuals before and after, in a more precise, and less facile way. Everything happens too conveniently for Sally & Luke, which then causes Bob’s demise. It never tries to go beyond facile storytelling, which makes viewing Coming Home a compelling, albeit incredibly frustrating watch. There are many things to admire, such as the incredible performances and Ashby’s ability to link everything through one single narrative thread, but there’s also many things to dislike and nitpick, such as Ashby’s facile, predictable, mode of storytelling. It’s a shame because he has made some incredible movies in his brief career, though it isn’t his worst one so there’s that.
