Hal Ashby’s Vietnam drama is close to remarkable for an hour, in a veterans’ ward that looks and sounds like the real thing. It then becomes a love triangle, a good one, and settles for being a good film rather than an important one.
Hal Ashby’s Coming Home begins in 1968 with a group of men in wheelchairs around a pool table, arguing about whether they would go back. Nobody has scripted them; they sound like men who have been having the conversation for months. It sets the standard for the first hour, which is as truthful as anything the American cinema managed about that war. Then the film settles into what the tagline promised, a woman between two men, and while it does that well, it does it the way a dozen other films have.
The ward is where Ashby and Haskell Wexler do their best work. Wexler shoots the hospital on long lenses in the light that happens to be there, so the corridors are dim and the day room is over-bright and the patients are in the frame whether the story needs them or not. Jon Voight’s Luke Martin enters it face down on a gurney, propelling himself with a cane, and Jane Fonda’s Sally knocks his catheter bag off on her first morning. He screams at her. It is the least sentimental introduction to a love story we can think of, and the film knows it.
Voight is the reason to see it. He plays the early scenes as pure fury, thrashing against orderlies, hurling his body about the ward as if it belonged to someone else, and then lets the anger drain out over the next forty minutes until what is left is a watchful, funny, wary man who has decided to live. We were shaken by him. There is a scene where he is finally in a wheelchair rather than on the gurney and he simply sits still for a moment, and the stillness said more about what he had lost than the shouting had.
Fonda has the harder job because Sally is the film’s argument, and Ashby signposts it. Ann Roth dresses her first in a stiff set of officer’s-wife outfits and a hairdo that looks lacquered on; by the beach house the hair is loose and the clothes are somebody else’s. Michael D. Haller gives her a base bungalow with everything in its place and then a wooden house by the water with sand on the floor. It is a little neat. Fonda earns it anyway, chiefly by never playing Sally as stupid before her awakening, only as a woman who had not yet been asked a question.
Bruce Dern’s Bob has less screen time and uses all of it. He is stiff, decent and eager, a man who has wanted a war his whole life and is slightly embarrassed by how much. Dern gives him a laugh that arrives a beat late and a way of standing that never relaxes, and when the film returns to him later it has earned the right to. Robert Ginty’s Dink Mobley, Bob’s friend and fellow officer, is the film’s picture of the man who came back without noticing anything.
The script, by Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones from Nancy Dowd’s story, loses its nerve in the second hour. Penelope Milford’s Vi is sharp and sad and the film keeps forgetting her; Robert Carradine’s Bill, hollow-eyed and frightened, is a thread the film picks up too late. Luke’s politics arrive as speeches, delivered to cameras or to schoolchildren, where the pool table had made them without a word. Don Zimmerman cuts the middle stretch as a run of songs and drives and beds, and the soundtrack, period records rather than a composed score, mostly the Rolling Stones, sits on top of scenes that could have carried themselves. When it works, as in one long drive with the radio on, it works because the song is allowed to finish.
Against Ashby’s own run of the seventies, The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1975), this is the one where the message shows. Those films let the audience find the meaning; this one hands it over. And yet the last ten minutes, which we will not describe, cut between two men and two ways of being a man in America, and they moved us more than the previous hour had led us to expect. It is the film the first act promised, arriving late.
Watch it for Voight, for the ward, and for the ending. It runs 127 minutes, carries an 18 for its frankness about sex and its language, and is better in company, with someone who will argue about whether the middle hour is a love story or a lecture.
